The first day of Paralympic competition being a Thursday, I was at work. This, despite what the more cynical among you might suggest, meant that I was unable to follow events live on Channel 4. Instead, I put my faith in Sky+ and recorded the whole blooming lot, intending to fish through the dregs to get to the good bits with the aid of the fast-forward button.
It all sounds so simple. It was, though I never expected to be able to get through over five hours of programming and still be in bed before midnight, bearing in mind that I also used the hours between 7.00 and 9.00 to watch Great Britain Men's first match in the wheelchair basketball tournament against Germany. Which was a thriller, but more about that later.
Trying to take things chronologically I put the morning session on first. I had been hearing some whispers of discontent from some people, who complained that there was too much chat from the presenters and not enough action. Their complaints were justified it has to be said. In just around three hours of air-time Channel 4 managed to broadcast eight swimming heats and a cycling heat on their main stream. The rest of the time was taken up by the man fast becoming the scourge of the Paralympic Games, Jonathan Edwards, chatting to his fellow presenters. Add in the endless commercial breaks and the exhaustive flogging of Giles Long's LEXI system explaining the various classification systems in Paralympic sport, and there wasn't actually that much air time left. Some of the swimming heats looked suspiciously less than live also, with the very first heat of the very first event being screened, but then the remaining heats dispensed with in favour of more chat from Edwards and Long. We did manage to see Jonathan Fox break the world record in his heat of the men's S7 100m backstroke. I'm almost sure I hear the commentator say that this is the second world record broken in the pool that morning, the other being broken by Ellie Simmonds, but if that did happen it is a piece of footage conspicious by it's absence. I think I might have imagined it, to be fair.
What I did not imagine was the lack of actual commentary in a heat of the men's men's S8 100m Butterfly featuring Great Britain's Sean Fraser. As he raced his way to the final, we get more of Edwards and Long, with the former in particular sounding like a man who has never left the desert trying to describe a snowstorm. I didn't get to see Fraser's final at all, in which he finished sixth, because the recording stopped seconds before he entered the pool as Channel 4 chose that moment to switch from one broadcasting slot to another. Before that, I did at least manage to see Hannah Russell pick up a silver medal in the women's S12 400m Freestyle and also Nyree Kindred earning the same accolade in the women's S6 100m backstroke.
Away from the pool and in fact away from that first morning session things were much improved, but not before a little more disappointment came my way. I was a little frustrated at not being able to see Scott Robertson or Sara Head's table tennis matches against the brilliantly named Ningning Cao of China and Hyun Ja Choi respectively. I have a greater interest in these two, having been on a sporting trip to Australia with Scott many years ago, and played basketball against Sara on several occasions. I couldn't get their matches online, and I couldn't find them on any of Channel 4's broadcasts. Scott lost 3-1 unfortunately, but this is something I found out via his Facebook page rather than any official media outlet. Thankfully, the table tennis competition is operating a league format for the early rounds so Scott will live to fight another day. Better news for Sara, who won her match 3-2.
Yet the lack of table tennis coverage was the last negative I'm going to bore you with today. Maybe. On condition that someone can explain to me how the GB women's basketball team's 62-35 defeat to Holland could be so heavily butchered? We see the last few minutes of the third quarter in which they slip behind by around 10-12 points, only to then be told in an instant that they were actually well beaten and we're all off to the Equestrian now if that's ok. Well no, it isn't. Not really.
Coverage of Great Britain's first gold medal, won by cyclist Sarah Storey in the women's C5 individual pursuit, is excellent, as is that for Mark Colbourne's silver medal in the men's C1-3 1km individual time trial. Interestingly, times in that event are factored down, so that the more severe the disability of the athlete, the more time is lopped off their time at the end to give them their overall placing. It can be complicated to follow, especially when you have Phil Liggett trying to explain it to you, but it was every bit as exciting to watch as the exploits of Hoy, Pendleton, Kenny and Trott in the Olympics.
So too was the men's basketball I mentioned earlier. Great Britain make a slow start against Germany, with Jan Haller shooting the proverbial lights out in the first half. At one point GB trail by 16 points in the second quarter, but fight back brilliantly to force the game into overtime at 66-66. However, they run out of steam in the extra five minutes and go down 77-72. Our former team-mate Dan Highcock is unused until the game is up well inside the last minute, which maybe due to the fact that he has had an injury recently, but is nevertheless a disappointment for people who like pointing at the telly and saying 'I know him'. Like the table tennis, the basketball competition has a league phase early on and so there is plenty of time for both the men's and the women's teams to make up for their opening day slip-ups.
I'm hoping Channel 4 do the same, but I must just leave you with one word of credit for them. The extra channels they have created to cover the main sports such as swimming, basketball and athletics are superb. None of this red button stuff you got from the BBC, but actual recorder-friendly channels which make it easier to avoid missing the best of the action. If only I had known about them a little earlier, I could have saved myself the bother of having to put up with Edwards and the main stream. I'd receommend this as the preferred method for following the Paralympic Games from now on.
Friday's action is already in the planner.
Friday, 31 August 2012
Thursday, 30 August 2012
Paralympics 2012 - Opening Night
After the massive success of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the Olympic Stadium saw the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympic Games last night (August 29).
I could just start and end this piece by telling you that it was utterly phenomenal. It really was inspiring, moving, spectacular, all of the things that you would hope for but dare not expect from an opening ceremony charged with the daunting responsibility of following on from Danny Boyle's superb extravaganza a month ago. It was well after midnight by the time it finished and I got to bed, but when it finally came to an end it left you in no doubt that the Paralympic Games were here, and that they were huge.
I have to say that at the start of Channel 4's live broadcast of the ceremony I wasn't expecting to feel quite so enthused and excited about the event by the end. I just didn't trust Channel 4 to be able to convey the magnitude of the thing to our living rooms. The previous evening's edition of Jon Snow's Paralympic Show had been a bit of a write-off. Jonathan Edwards missing his cue and then looking rudely over the shoulder of the person he was meant to be interviewing did not inspire condfidence. Nor did Snow's apparent lack of knowledge of all things sport, never mind Paralympic sport. He's a newsreader, and it showed.
Snow and Edwards are in attendance again for the grand opening, and they are joined by Paralympic wheelchair basketball bronze medallist and television presenter Ade Adepitan. He's a much safer pair of hands. I'm loathe to pepper this piece with clanging examples of name-dropping, but he is the first of several faces familiar to me throughout the night. Being around the same age, I played against Ade at junior levels and in the league on countless occasions.
The junior matches were particularly intense. It seemed like almost every year the national junior title would be between his London-based Tigers and our North West-based Meteors team. We won some, we lost some but they were all great battles. There is an old cover of the Great Britain Wheelchair Basketball Association Handbook which has a photograph of Ade and I contesting a ball. It is not a word of a lie that a split second after this photograph was taken I lobbed the ball over his head as he over-stretched to try and take it away from me, and then I had the whole court open to drive straight in for an easy lay-up. Well, as easy as lay-ups ever got for me. Which wasn't very. I can't remember whether we won or lost that game but I'm doing aeroplanes around the room just thinking about that moment. It doesn't get any better. Unlike Ade, who got an awful lot better than me and most other players very quickly.
Back to the plot. There's a countdown to the start of the ceremony appearing intermittently in the bottom corner of the screen. We only have about 18 minutes at this point, but this is time enough for a truly humbling and inspiring film about one of the athletes competing in the games. Martine Wright is part of the women's sitting volleyball team, and her back story is of her experience of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. Just a day after it was announced that London would be hosting the games, Martine lost both of her legs when a device was detonated on the tube train near Aldgate Station. Her journey to this point has been a remarkable one. She feels lucky, she says, which is a stark reminder to all of us that as difficult as things get from time to time, there is always something to be grateful for, to be positive about.
And then it starts. Snow hands over almost seamlessly (almost) to Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Jeff Adams. Adams is a former Paralympic athlete from Canada, six times a world champion on the track. The relationship between the two should work. The vastly experienced broadcaster and news man and the sporting expert, but they have their moments. When the Canadian team enters the parade Guru-Murthy instructs his co-commentator to stop talking about his country. He's only half joking and there is a troubling silence for a couple of moments afterwards.
The parade has several moments of uncertainty and intrigue, moments when you wonder whether what you have just seen was really meant to happen and when you wonder what might happen next. An Australian athlete stumbles on the track and nearly incapacitates himself before competition has even begun. An Algerian waves a two-fingered salute to the camera. There's a Danish athlete propelling his wheelchair around the track using only his legs and feet, and to help him do so more quickly he is doing it backwards. A Brazilian enters fully into the spirit by painting his face entirely in the colours of his national flag. There are Irish and Belgian athletes accompanied by helper dogs. All this aswell as Ghanaians dancing, Mexicans decked out in faboulously colourful ponchos and sombreros, and German ladies in striking pink outfits.
But there's a gripe. There's always a gripe, unfortunately. In the Beijing Paralympics of 2008 China topped the medal table by the proverbial country mile. Their Paralympic team is vast, almost epic. They are expected to lord it over everyone once again here in the UK. Nobody has told the producers at Channel 4 however, who within a few moments of the emergence of the Chinese team into the stadium, choose to go to a commercial break. Now, we all understand the need for commercial channels to raise the funds to be able to afford to broadcast events of this importance, but really, does the timing of ad breaks have to be so well......untimely? Undeniably it takes something away from the event. The Chinese athletes are set to become some of the biggest stars of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. I'm sure the audience would have benefitted from a little introduction.
It's not that Channel 4 haven't considered the need for their audience to get to know the athletes. They have taken certain steps to do so which would never have been taken for the Olympic Games. Several athletes (including the Australian who later stumbles during the parade and our very own Martine Wright) are interviewed by Claire Balding as they wait to enter the stadium. This just would not happen during the Olympic Games opening ceremony. Not a second of Boyle's show was sacrificed to add in interviews with athletes outside the stadium. It's hard to say whether Channel 4's alternative approach helps or hinders the viewing experience. It's a debate we could have I suppose. But alternative is exactly what Channel 4 are. It's always been pretty much their raison d'etre.
So what are we potentially missing during these sometimes unwanted interludes? In short...Englightenment. This is the title of the ceremony which, introduced by theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking, has just about everything. There's Sir Ian McKellen as Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest, an unrecognisable Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson (among many others and yes I did meet her once) suspended from a wire above the stadium, hundreds of dancers (including one double amputee ballet dancer), Birdy, Beverley Knight, a model of the statue of Alison Lapper - a double amputee as pregnant as one of the pauses during a conversation between Snow and Edwards - and finally Margaret Maughan, the first Brit to win a Paralympic gold medal all the way back in 1960. Maughan lights the flame, but not before it is brought into the stadium on a zip-wire by another double amputee and aspiring Paralympian Joe Townsend. Swimmer Liz Johnson takes the athletes oath and then there are the speeches, plenty of speeches.
Following Lord Coe is Sir Philip Craven, President of the International Paralympic Committee. Clang, there goes another name-drop but the paths of Sir Phil and myself have crossed many times. He was involved in wheelchair basketball long before I was born and, from what I have heard of that time, was among the very best players in the world in his day. When I played against him he was a little way past that, but he was still outstanding. He had this metronomic, almost faultless shooting technique and was just deadly from anywhere inside the three-point line, particularly from either baseline. I remember him trying to pass on some of this wisdom to me at the many junior international training camps I attended years ago. Before the beer and women. Before Haj and Nigel. That's a whole other blog. Suffice to say that not even Sir Phil Craven could have drummed the requisite attributes into me.
But....it does bring me nicely onto what for me was the spine-tinglingly bitter-sweet highlight (and lowlight) of the whole shebang. Just after the parade, and just before Maughan lit the flame, the Olympic flag was carried into the stadium by members of the Great Britain Men's under-22 wheelchair basketball team. You can probably fill in the rest yourselves by now but just for the avoidance of any confusion...I used to be in that! I can't explain to you what it would have been like to be a part of the opening ceremony, carrying the Olympic flag into the stadium with my team-mates. No really I can't explain to you because it never happened. I was 15 years too late, as I explained immediately and somewhat impulsively on my Facebook page. One man who does know now is Billy Bridge, a member of my former side the Vikings and one of the lucky ones able to take part with his under-22 team-mates. We also have a former Viking in the men's squad competing in London in Dan Highcock. Another former Viking, Dave Heaton, will be competing in his sixth Games in the sport of wheelchair fencing. It's a proud time to be associated with the club.
But this not about me and the Vikings. Much. So we'll move to the finale. It was well past my bedtime but I wasn't missing Beverley Knight's jaw-droppingly rousing rendition of 'I Am What I Am'. If it didn't move you then the bad news is that you're dead. Choosing a Gloria Gaynor number might ordinarily be considered a little cliched, but somehow it just seemed to fit. The brilliance of Knight helped win me over here, I have to admit. The cynic in me might normally have argued that we want to focus on the sport itself and not the overcoming of adversity or the ongoing fight for acceptance in society. Sometimes as a disabled person you feel like there is no in between. You're either a hero and an inspiration or you're an embarrassment. I don't want to be either and I don't feel like either. I'm just a bloke from Thatto Heath.
As I finish this I have just started my lunch break and I'm into the action. Spain are making short work of Italy in the men's wheelchair basketball (yes, for the umpteenth time, the place I maybe could have been if I hadn't been railroaded by my alcoholism and my lack of ability). It's really here.
Enjoy it.
I could just start and end this piece by telling you that it was utterly phenomenal. It really was inspiring, moving, spectacular, all of the things that you would hope for but dare not expect from an opening ceremony charged with the daunting responsibility of following on from Danny Boyle's superb extravaganza a month ago. It was well after midnight by the time it finished and I got to bed, but when it finally came to an end it left you in no doubt that the Paralympic Games were here, and that they were huge.
I have to say that at the start of Channel 4's live broadcast of the ceremony I wasn't expecting to feel quite so enthused and excited about the event by the end. I just didn't trust Channel 4 to be able to convey the magnitude of the thing to our living rooms. The previous evening's edition of Jon Snow's Paralympic Show had been a bit of a write-off. Jonathan Edwards missing his cue and then looking rudely over the shoulder of the person he was meant to be interviewing did not inspire condfidence. Nor did Snow's apparent lack of knowledge of all things sport, never mind Paralympic sport. He's a newsreader, and it showed.
Snow and Edwards are in attendance again for the grand opening, and they are joined by Paralympic wheelchair basketball bronze medallist and television presenter Ade Adepitan. He's a much safer pair of hands. I'm loathe to pepper this piece with clanging examples of name-dropping, but he is the first of several faces familiar to me throughout the night. Being around the same age, I played against Ade at junior levels and in the league on countless occasions.
The junior matches were particularly intense. It seemed like almost every year the national junior title would be between his London-based Tigers and our North West-based Meteors team. We won some, we lost some but they were all great battles. There is an old cover of the Great Britain Wheelchair Basketball Association Handbook which has a photograph of Ade and I contesting a ball. It is not a word of a lie that a split second after this photograph was taken I lobbed the ball over his head as he over-stretched to try and take it away from me, and then I had the whole court open to drive straight in for an easy lay-up. Well, as easy as lay-ups ever got for me. Which wasn't very. I can't remember whether we won or lost that game but I'm doing aeroplanes around the room just thinking about that moment. It doesn't get any better. Unlike Ade, who got an awful lot better than me and most other players very quickly.
Back to the plot. There's a countdown to the start of the ceremony appearing intermittently in the bottom corner of the screen. We only have about 18 minutes at this point, but this is time enough for a truly humbling and inspiring film about one of the athletes competing in the games. Martine Wright is part of the women's sitting volleyball team, and her back story is of her experience of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. Just a day after it was announced that London would be hosting the games, Martine lost both of her legs when a device was detonated on the tube train near Aldgate Station. Her journey to this point has been a remarkable one. She feels lucky, she says, which is a stark reminder to all of us that as difficult as things get from time to time, there is always something to be grateful for, to be positive about.
And then it starts. Snow hands over almost seamlessly (almost) to Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Jeff Adams. Adams is a former Paralympic athlete from Canada, six times a world champion on the track. The relationship between the two should work. The vastly experienced broadcaster and news man and the sporting expert, but they have their moments. When the Canadian team enters the parade Guru-Murthy instructs his co-commentator to stop talking about his country. He's only half joking and there is a troubling silence for a couple of moments afterwards.
The parade has several moments of uncertainty and intrigue, moments when you wonder whether what you have just seen was really meant to happen and when you wonder what might happen next. An Australian athlete stumbles on the track and nearly incapacitates himself before competition has even begun. An Algerian waves a two-fingered salute to the camera. There's a Danish athlete propelling his wheelchair around the track using only his legs and feet, and to help him do so more quickly he is doing it backwards. A Brazilian enters fully into the spirit by painting his face entirely in the colours of his national flag. There are Irish and Belgian athletes accompanied by helper dogs. All this aswell as Ghanaians dancing, Mexicans decked out in faboulously colourful ponchos and sombreros, and German ladies in striking pink outfits.
But there's a gripe. There's always a gripe, unfortunately. In the Beijing Paralympics of 2008 China topped the medal table by the proverbial country mile. Their Paralympic team is vast, almost epic. They are expected to lord it over everyone once again here in the UK. Nobody has told the producers at Channel 4 however, who within a few moments of the emergence of the Chinese team into the stadium, choose to go to a commercial break. Now, we all understand the need for commercial channels to raise the funds to be able to afford to broadcast events of this importance, but really, does the timing of ad breaks have to be so well......untimely? Undeniably it takes something away from the event. The Chinese athletes are set to become some of the biggest stars of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. I'm sure the audience would have benefitted from a little introduction.
It's not that Channel 4 haven't considered the need for their audience to get to know the athletes. They have taken certain steps to do so which would never have been taken for the Olympic Games. Several athletes (including the Australian who later stumbles during the parade and our very own Martine Wright) are interviewed by Claire Balding as they wait to enter the stadium. This just would not happen during the Olympic Games opening ceremony. Not a second of Boyle's show was sacrificed to add in interviews with athletes outside the stadium. It's hard to say whether Channel 4's alternative approach helps or hinders the viewing experience. It's a debate we could have I suppose. But alternative is exactly what Channel 4 are. It's always been pretty much their raison d'etre.
So what are we potentially missing during these sometimes unwanted interludes? In short...Englightenment. This is the title of the ceremony which, introduced by theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking, has just about everything. There's Sir Ian McKellen as Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest, an unrecognisable Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson (among many others and yes I did meet her once) suspended from a wire above the stadium, hundreds of dancers (including one double amputee ballet dancer), Birdy, Beverley Knight, a model of the statue of Alison Lapper - a double amputee as pregnant as one of the pauses during a conversation between Snow and Edwards - and finally Margaret Maughan, the first Brit to win a Paralympic gold medal all the way back in 1960. Maughan lights the flame, but not before it is brought into the stadium on a zip-wire by another double amputee and aspiring Paralympian Joe Townsend. Swimmer Liz Johnson takes the athletes oath and then there are the speeches, plenty of speeches.
Following Lord Coe is Sir Philip Craven, President of the International Paralympic Committee. Clang, there goes another name-drop but the paths of Sir Phil and myself have crossed many times. He was involved in wheelchair basketball long before I was born and, from what I have heard of that time, was among the very best players in the world in his day. When I played against him he was a little way past that, but he was still outstanding. He had this metronomic, almost faultless shooting technique and was just deadly from anywhere inside the three-point line, particularly from either baseline. I remember him trying to pass on some of this wisdom to me at the many junior international training camps I attended years ago. Before the beer and women. Before Haj and Nigel. That's a whole other blog. Suffice to say that not even Sir Phil Craven could have drummed the requisite attributes into me.
But....it does bring me nicely onto what for me was the spine-tinglingly bitter-sweet highlight (and lowlight) of the whole shebang. Just after the parade, and just before Maughan lit the flame, the Olympic flag was carried into the stadium by members of the Great Britain Men's under-22 wheelchair basketball team. You can probably fill in the rest yourselves by now but just for the avoidance of any confusion...I used to be in that! I can't explain to you what it would have been like to be a part of the opening ceremony, carrying the Olympic flag into the stadium with my team-mates. No really I can't explain to you because it never happened. I was 15 years too late, as I explained immediately and somewhat impulsively on my Facebook page. One man who does know now is Billy Bridge, a member of my former side the Vikings and one of the lucky ones able to take part with his under-22 team-mates. We also have a former Viking in the men's squad competing in London in Dan Highcock. Another former Viking, Dave Heaton, will be competing in his sixth Games in the sport of wheelchair fencing. It's a proud time to be associated with the club.
But this not about me and the Vikings. Much. So we'll move to the finale. It was well past my bedtime but I wasn't missing Beverley Knight's jaw-droppingly rousing rendition of 'I Am What I Am'. If it didn't move you then the bad news is that you're dead. Choosing a Gloria Gaynor number might ordinarily be considered a little cliched, but somehow it just seemed to fit. The brilliance of Knight helped win me over here, I have to admit. The cynic in me might normally have argued that we want to focus on the sport itself and not the overcoming of adversity or the ongoing fight for acceptance in society. Sometimes as a disabled person you feel like there is no in between. You're either a hero and an inspiration or you're an embarrassment. I don't want to be either and I don't feel like either. I'm just a bloke from Thatto Heath.
As I finish this I have just started my lunch break and I'm into the action. Spain are making short work of Italy in the men's wheelchair basketball (yes, for the umpteenth time, the place I maybe could have been if I hadn't been railroaded by my alcoholism and my lack of ability). It's really here.
Enjoy it.
Thursday, 23 August 2012
Pushed Too Far
You can let something go once, but when it happens twice it becomes a trend. Or if not a trend, then at the very least it becomes blog-worthy.
Actually I didn't let it go last time. I wrote it on my Facebook. But there didn't seem any way that it would stretch to an entire blog entry. Until now. Until it has happened again. A few months ago I was getting off the train at Thatto Heath station. This is something I do around 100-150 times a year (when I am in one of my sporadic gym phases in any event). It is important to remember just how routine this is for me. As I pushed up the admittedly large and fairly steep ramp towards the main road leading home, I felt a hand on my back. Then another. I actually took a push up the ramp with two as yet unidentified mits upon my personage. A little startled, I turned around to find a middle-aged man nodding at me and continuing to push his hands into my back in a hopeful attempt to propel me up the ramp;
"No thanks, mate. I'm alright." I said.
His hands did not move. I took another push, still with his hands upon me. I turned around again, only this time I didn't say anything. I just gave him a look. A look that said everything I needed to convey. A look that said 'take your frigging hands off me now, you moron. Do you really imagine that I only make this journey home from work this way in the hope that someone like you will kindly offer to push me up this fucking ramp?'. He got the message and shot me back a look that said 'I was only trying to help, God, chip on your shoulder or what?
Yeah mate, deep fat fryer, now fuck off.
And so to today. I have had an appointment at the doctors. I have been having regular appointments at my surgery for reasons which, while they would make hysterical blog material I am sure, are too personal to discuss here. It went well anyway, thanks for asking, but just as there is a large ramp between me and the exit to my local train station, so there is a similarly whopping great hill on the road between the surgery and my house.
I had almost reached the top of said hill when I heard a car engine behind me. This hapens a lot because I tend to forget that I am not in possession of an engine, and only take into account the fact that it is easier to push on the road than it is to push on the pavement, which is often uneven, sloped or, horror of all horrors, cobbled. So I moved sideways wearily, further towards the unfavoured terrain of the pavement to allow the car to pass me. Only it didn't. Instead the driver, another ageing man who looked no more capable of running up a hill than I, actually got out of his car and asked whether I might like a push up the hill. Now I know he might mean well, but again I must enquire as to whether people really believe that a person who needs a push up a bloody great hill would be out on his own trying to conquer a bloody great hill?
I have already commented elsewhere that the man offering me a push today is likely to need a push up a hill himself before I do. He was not exactly young and not exactly in the peak of his physical fitness. Yet he took one look at my wheelchair and decided that he was the best man for the job of lugging my arse up to the top of the hill. That there were only around ten yards remaining to the summit at that point in any case seems a moot point now.
The Paralympics start next week. You will see disabled people performing physical and mental acts which make pushing up a steep hill near a local park look like rolling over in bed. I just hope that the man I encountered today, and his predecessor from the train station a few months ago, actually witness some of Channel 4's coverage and adapt their perceptions of what disabled people can and can't do for themselves.
My hope is very probably a forlorn one.
Actually I didn't let it go last time. I wrote it on my Facebook. But there didn't seem any way that it would stretch to an entire blog entry. Until now. Until it has happened again. A few months ago I was getting off the train at Thatto Heath station. This is something I do around 100-150 times a year (when I am in one of my sporadic gym phases in any event). It is important to remember just how routine this is for me. As I pushed up the admittedly large and fairly steep ramp towards the main road leading home, I felt a hand on my back. Then another. I actually took a push up the ramp with two as yet unidentified mits upon my personage. A little startled, I turned around to find a middle-aged man nodding at me and continuing to push his hands into my back in a hopeful attempt to propel me up the ramp;
"No thanks, mate. I'm alright." I said.
His hands did not move. I took another push, still with his hands upon me. I turned around again, only this time I didn't say anything. I just gave him a look. A look that said everything I needed to convey. A look that said 'take your frigging hands off me now, you moron. Do you really imagine that I only make this journey home from work this way in the hope that someone like you will kindly offer to push me up this fucking ramp?'. He got the message and shot me back a look that said 'I was only trying to help, God, chip on your shoulder or what?
Yeah mate, deep fat fryer, now fuck off.
And so to today. I have had an appointment at the doctors. I have been having regular appointments at my surgery for reasons which, while they would make hysterical blog material I am sure, are too personal to discuss here. It went well anyway, thanks for asking, but just as there is a large ramp between me and the exit to my local train station, so there is a similarly whopping great hill on the road between the surgery and my house.
I had almost reached the top of said hill when I heard a car engine behind me. This hapens a lot because I tend to forget that I am not in possession of an engine, and only take into account the fact that it is easier to push on the road than it is to push on the pavement, which is often uneven, sloped or, horror of all horrors, cobbled. So I moved sideways wearily, further towards the unfavoured terrain of the pavement to allow the car to pass me. Only it didn't. Instead the driver, another ageing man who looked no more capable of running up a hill than I, actually got out of his car and asked whether I might like a push up the hill. Now I know he might mean well, but again I must enquire as to whether people really believe that a person who needs a push up a bloody great hill would be out on his own trying to conquer a bloody great hill?
I have already commented elsewhere that the man offering me a push today is likely to need a push up a hill himself before I do. He was not exactly young and not exactly in the peak of his physical fitness. Yet he took one look at my wheelchair and decided that he was the best man for the job of lugging my arse up to the top of the hill. That there were only around ten yards remaining to the summit at that point in any case seems a moot point now.
The Paralympics start next week. You will see disabled people performing physical and mental acts which make pushing up a steep hill near a local park look like rolling over in bed. I just hope that the man I encountered today, and his predecessor from the train station a few months ago, actually witness some of Channel 4's coverage and adapt their perceptions of what disabled people can and can't do for themselves.
My hope is very probably a forlorn one.
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Lord Morris - What's Changed?
Before yesterday I had never heard of Lord Alf Morris, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 84. Most disabled people will, if they are honest, tell you the same thing. But those of us now in education, employment, involved in sport, indeed who are integrating into society in all sorts of different ways owe Lord Alf a great debt of gratitude.
The perception of members of the House of Lords is one of old farts nodding off during readings of legislatory bills which have already been passed elsewhere. While that may be true of many, Lord Morris is one whose political career has seen him make a real difference to the lives of a great many people, myself included. It was Lord Morris who was at the forefront of the very first UK disability rights legislation back in 1970. It was a model which has been copied throughout the world and it laid the foundations for all of the greater freedoms we now enjoy.
You might not believe me if you have been trawling through my photographs on Facebook (which you have, admit it), but I wasn't around in 1970. I can only imagine what it must have been like for disabled people in Britain at that time. Regular visitors to this page will probably have been persuaded that it is not exactly shits and giggles even now, but it must have been far worse back then. Many disabled people were institutionalised, denied education and employment, locked away from the rest of society lest they bring about embarrassing attention. Sport was mostly off the agenda too, yet millions will tune into Channel 4 to see the best disabled athletes in the world compete at the London 2012 Paralympic Games in a couple of weeks. That we have come so far is due in no small part to Lord Alf and that first piece of legislation.
It has been a slow process. Improvements did not happen overnight. Where now we take disabled toilets, ramps, lifts etc for granted in many places, this was not always the case even after 1970. I started school in 1979 (at the age of three!) and was straight away unable to attend the same school as my sister, my cousins and all of the other children who grew up in the same area. None of the mainstream schools had the structures in place to provide access for a child with a phsyical disability back then. By the time I was 11 and ready to enter secondary school it was probably possible for me to attend a mainstream school but I never really considered it or even looked any further into it. There was still a social barrier which I feared could not be overcome. It was too much of a wrench to leave the familiar environment that had been created for me over the previous eight years. I was too comfortable, but I was contributing to my own social exclusion. I'm still paying for that.
Instead I was sent out to local mainstream schools to get myself a more rounded education. The special school I attended, as wonderful as all the staff there were, could not provide teaching to the standard that we were now showing that we required. Because we were able, because we could progress academically just as well as the able bodied children. This was somehow not thought possible before, or at least not important. We weren't going to be able to go out and work, so they thought, so why bother educating us? People like Lord Morris changed all that, but it hasn't been an easy transition.
During the time I spent at mainstream school I got a taste of what it might have been like had I attended full time. At Sutton High School my friend Phil and I studied French, Media Studies and Science to GCSE level. The vagaries of the timetable had it that on one day of the week we would have a session in all three of these subjects, so we spent the whole day there and just tried as best we could to fill in the gaps between lessons. That proved far more difficult than it should have been. It was the early 1990's but still our segregation from the others was plainly obvious. The school had social areas for the pupils to use during breaks and at lunchtime. Yet some pupils had damaged some of the seating, meaning that no students were allowed in from then on. Fine, we will all go outside then, right? Not you two. We can't have you going out in the rain or rolling over that dangerous concrete. We were told to stay in the social areas, indoors. We couldn't go outside, the other pupils couldn't come inside. It's too strong to compare it to Apartheid, but it was clearly segregation through lack of trust, through fear of what might happen. To us, to the other children. To society.
Even today we still have an awful long way to go in my view with regards to social attitudes and genuine integration and that is a two-way street. For every person who devalues you and thinks that you can't do your job or play sport or contribute to a debate because of your disability, there is a disabled person sat on his or her fat arse asking him or herself why they should bother and therefore doing nothing.
The government don't help, regardless of which party is in power. As much as I would relish the opportunity to call David Cameron a twat again, this is not a party political issue. I didn't start working until I was 31 years old, simply because they were paying me too much money to sit at home. There is still a perception among many disabled people that they are better off not bothering, and this extends to sport, education, socialising, everything. It's a miserable, sad state of affairs in many cases but then when you consider how poorly some of the older generation of disabled people were educated it is hard to argue with the notion that they have become too far disadvantaged to be employable now. Positive discrimination will get you an interview if you know what they are looking for in the job spec and you can communicate that effectively in writing, but after that you are on your own. The treatment they have had has made many disabled people set in their ways and lacking in belief. In themselves and in others.
I think in many ways, the younger you are as a disabled person now, the better chance you have of fully integrating. I have friends who are 5-8 years younger than me and it is noticable how much better they communicate with able bodied people their own age than even I do. I know able-bodied people who, if you asked them, would tell you they are my friends but whom I know are distinctly uncomfortable in my company, particularly if it is my company alone. Yeah it's cool to knock about with a disabled person, it shows you have an open mind and you're not shallow, heaven forbid. But don't take a disabled person out on the pull with you, is very much the philosophy. More and more, the young just don't think this way because they have dealt with it at an earlier age. Like learning a foreign language from the age of five instead of trying to learn it when you are 11. I'm sure if you took a camera into a school now you would find it hard to notice any difference between the treatment of disabled kids and any of the other kids. Maybe in 20 years from now people won't even acknowledge or notice disability in any meaningful way at all.
If that happens it will be largely down to the efforts of Lord Alf Morris.
The perception of members of the House of Lords is one of old farts nodding off during readings of legislatory bills which have already been passed elsewhere. While that may be true of many, Lord Morris is one whose political career has seen him make a real difference to the lives of a great many people, myself included. It was Lord Morris who was at the forefront of the very first UK disability rights legislation back in 1970. It was a model which has been copied throughout the world and it laid the foundations for all of the greater freedoms we now enjoy.
You might not believe me if you have been trawling through my photographs on Facebook (which you have, admit it), but I wasn't around in 1970. I can only imagine what it must have been like for disabled people in Britain at that time. Regular visitors to this page will probably have been persuaded that it is not exactly shits and giggles even now, but it must have been far worse back then. Many disabled people were institutionalised, denied education and employment, locked away from the rest of society lest they bring about embarrassing attention. Sport was mostly off the agenda too, yet millions will tune into Channel 4 to see the best disabled athletes in the world compete at the London 2012 Paralympic Games in a couple of weeks. That we have come so far is due in no small part to Lord Alf and that first piece of legislation.
It has been a slow process. Improvements did not happen overnight. Where now we take disabled toilets, ramps, lifts etc for granted in many places, this was not always the case even after 1970. I started school in 1979 (at the age of three!) and was straight away unable to attend the same school as my sister, my cousins and all of the other children who grew up in the same area. None of the mainstream schools had the structures in place to provide access for a child with a phsyical disability back then. By the time I was 11 and ready to enter secondary school it was probably possible for me to attend a mainstream school but I never really considered it or even looked any further into it. There was still a social barrier which I feared could not be overcome. It was too much of a wrench to leave the familiar environment that had been created for me over the previous eight years. I was too comfortable, but I was contributing to my own social exclusion. I'm still paying for that.
Instead I was sent out to local mainstream schools to get myself a more rounded education. The special school I attended, as wonderful as all the staff there were, could not provide teaching to the standard that we were now showing that we required. Because we were able, because we could progress academically just as well as the able bodied children. This was somehow not thought possible before, or at least not important. We weren't going to be able to go out and work, so they thought, so why bother educating us? People like Lord Morris changed all that, but it hasn't been an easy transition.
During the time I spent at mainstream school I got a taste of what it might have been like had I attended full time. At Sutton High School my friend Phil and I studied French, Media Studies and Science to GCSE level. The vagaries of the timetable had it that on one day of the week we would have a session in all three of these subjects, so we spent the whole day there and just tried as best we could to fill in the gaps between lessons. That proved far more difficult than it should have been. It was the early 1990's but still our segregation from the others was plainly obvious. The school had social areas for the pupils to use during breaks and at lunchtime. Yet some pupils had damaged some of the seating, meaning that no students were allowed in from then on. Fine, we will all go outside then, right? Not you two. We can't have you going out in the rain or rolling over that dangerous concrete. We were told to stay in the social areas, indoors. We couldn't go outside, the other pupils couldn't come inside. It's too strong to compare it to Apartheid, but it was clearly segregation through lack of trust, through fear of what might happen. To us, to the other children. To society.
Even today we still have an awful long way to go in my view with regards to social attitudes and genuine integration and that is a two-way street. For every person who devalues you and thinks that you can't do your job or play sport or contribute to a debate because of your disability, there is a disabled person sat on his or her fat arse asking him or herself why they should bother and therefore doing nothing.
The government don't help, regardless of which party is in power. As much as I would relish the opportunity to call David Cameron a twat again, this is not a party political issue. I didn't start working until I was 31 years old, simply because they were paying me too much money to sit at home. There is still a perception among many disabled people that they are better off not bothering, and this extends to sport, education, socialising, everything. It's a miserable, sad state of affairs in many cases but then when you consider how poorly some of the older generation of disabled people were educated it is hard to argue with the notion that they have become too far disadvantaged to be employable now. Positive discrimination will get you an interview if you know what they are looking for in the job spec and you can communicate that effectively in writing, but after that you are on your own. The treatment they have had has made many disabled people set in their ways and lacking in belief. In themselves and in others.
I think in many ways, the younger you are as a disabled person now, the better chance you have of fully integrating. I have friends who are 5-8 years younger than me and it is noticable how much better they communicate with able bodied people their own age than even I do. I know able-bodied people who, if you asked them, would tell you they are my friends but whom I know are distinctly uncomfortable in my company, particularly if it is my company alone. Yeah it's cool to knock about with a disabled person, it shows you have an open mind and you're not shallow, heaven forbid. But don't take a disabled person out on the pull with you, is very much the philosophy. More and more, the young just don't think this way because they have dealt with it at an earlier age. Like learning a foreign language from the age of five instead of trying to learn it when you are 11. I'm sure if you took a camera into a school now you would find it hard to notice any difference between the treatment of disabled kids and any of the other kids. Maybe in 20 years from now people won't even acknowledge or notice disability in any meaningful way at all.
If that happens it will be largely down to the efforts of Lord Alf Morris.
Thursday, 2 August 2012
The South West - Part One
Perhaps he won't thank me for telling you this but Emma's Dad celebrated (if that is the word) his 60th birthday recently. To mark the occasion we spent the weekend in a cottage in a place called Keinton Mandeville near Yeovil. That's Somerset for those of you who get lost once you turn off the East Lancashire Road.
Since Emma and I had the whole of that following week off from work the plan was to spend a few nights in Bath also. As ever when I am involved, what followed was a heady mixture of chaos, farce and shouty Scottish men.
It starts in Bristol. It's quite a long drive to Keinton Mandeville so Emma wants to break it up by staying somewhere along the way. So we check into the Arnos Manor Forestdale Hotel. This isn't a bad little place, but it has to be one of the colder places I have been to in mid-July. An apalling summer isn't helping, but someone somewhere has clearly decided that air conditioning in the restaurant is a good idea. But it's not. It's freezing cold and it feels even colder for the fact that it is all but empty.
There is just one other couple in the restaurant tonight and while I am tucking into my fish and chips I can hear the gentleman complaining to the waiter about immigrants. It's real Daily Mail stuff about how those rotten foreigners have taken all the jobs but the man has managed to miss two superb ironies. Firstly, that the basis of his story centres around a son of his who lives in Australia. Immigration? You bet. Secondly, the waiter unfortunate enough to be listening to the man's archaic ramblings happens to be from South Africa. It's unfathomable how he hasn't realised this since the waiter is chatting away in the kind of accent which makes Kevin Pietersen sound like Boris Johnson. Regardless, the man ploughs on, bemoaning the invasion of foreigners and no doubt the demise of capital punishment. I don't know, I've stopped listening by now.
We return the following morning for breakfast. We are greeted by an incredibly smiley young woman. She looks around the room with a puzzled look on her face as if she doesn't quite know where to place this strange individual who has insisted on bringing a wheelchair to breakfast. Finally she hits upon the brilliant idea of putting us at a table next to the wall, just in behind one that is already occupied by two men. One of the men is decidedly portly, and you can see the crack of his arse from Leeds. He is wearing trousers, but only in the same way that Rihanna wears trousers when she wants to promote a new album. But the man is no Rihanna in visual terms. Not unless Rihanna has put ten stones of weight on and developed a serious problem with body hair since her last performance. Mercifully, I take the seat facing away from butt-crack man, and Emma can't see it either because I am now blocking it out.
There is considerably less meat on a woman sitting just across the room from us. Excess skin puts you off your sausage and egg. The woman is, shall we say, mature, and is as bony as it is possible to be without being in an Indiana Jones or a Sinbad film. I'm finding it hard to look at her, but I'm also finding it hard to look away. I start to feel like Austin Powers looking at Fred Savage's mole. These really are the major issues concerning me from our otherwise uneventful trip to Bristol.
Skipping the journey down to Keinton Mandeville almost completely (we took quite a while to find the cottage itself once we had found the right street because they all look the same) we arrive at the grandly named Coombe Hill Cottage. The path outside is covered entirely in gravel, and the woman we are renting from happens to be at the house and advises us that it will be ready in a couple of hours once they have finished cleaning. She also tells us that the entrance we need to use is around the back of the cottage, which is great news for anyone who thinks pushing a wheelchair on gravel might be fun.
With the car parked and a couple of hours to kill we hobble back down the path out on to the main road and head up the street to find a pub. We stop at a small local shop for local people for reasons I cannot and care not to remember, but I am pleasantly surprised to find that it is only a further minute or two to the pub. The Quarry is a very nice little establishment and it helps that finally, after what seems like three months of solid rain day after day, the sun is beating down. We order a drink and spend a very agreeable hour in the beer garden. The couple of beers I down when we get back to the cottage have an effect, and I'm still asleep when the rest of Emma's family get to there at around tea-time. I had been watching golf also, which might not have been the best way to keep my mind occupied and stave off the lethargy which inevitably results from afternoon drinking. And normally I like golf.
We're not going to elaborate on the evenings in Keinton Mandeville. Principally this is because I find forced fun quite traumatic. I can summarise thus; There were barbecues, quizzes and beer and it was unseasonably cold especially given the warm temperatures in daylight hours. If there was a highlight then for me it was the sight of Emma's one-year-old neice smashing the pinata with a stick and shouting 'whack' with every swing. Then her mother, Emma's sister-in-law, took a turn and knocked the donkey's head clean off with one swing. The head then found it's way around the dinner table and it was all a bit like something out of a Godfather movie. Whack.
So anyway we will stick mostly to the daytime activities because that is when we travelled around and experienced a little of the local south west culture. On Saturday morning, after an interminable wait for everyone to get ready, we venture towards the city of Wells. Test Match Special is on the radio in the car and England are taking a fearful pasting from South Africa. They have been bowled out for 385 and the South Africans are something like 4,384 for no wicket. Or something. Prospects for the team are so bad that the commentators have already started ignoring the action and instead playing word games or making up lists of the best left-handed South Africans and so forth.
Wells is one of the smallest cities in England and is best known for it's cathedral and other religiously associated architecture. Again I must re-iterate my utter disdain for religion, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested. We go into St.Andrew's Cathedral and end up on a short guided tour. The guide is called Elizabeth something or other, and she's informative enough but you get the feeling she wishes she was elsewhere. There are only myself, Emma, her mum and another couple on the tour which, considering it is free, is a pretty poor return. Religion might be crap, but what about history and architecture? It seems that they are not enough to interest the public of Wells today and so we press on in our uncomfortably small group.
Wells Cathedral of St.Andrew is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells who, on the balance of probabilities, does not eat babies. It dates back to the 10th century but now, by far it's most pleasing attribute is it's clock. Alongside the large 24-hour clock face sits a model of a man called Jack. When Jack kicks his legs a series of wooden soldiers on wooden horseback appear from the top of the clock like demented cuckoos. They play out a brief battle in which one soldier is killed, only for him to re-emerge patched up to go through the whole thing again five or six times. It's a kind of mini-purgatory for the poor wooden soldier, but given that he is wooden and therefore devoid of any feelings it is all good, harmless entertainment.
Our guide gives up after around half an hour of shining her torch at the 'monsters' she finds carved into the architecture and speculating on what they may have originally represented. She seems very unsure of herself throughout and is particularly befuddled when one man asks whether Wells Cathedral is the final burial place of King Ethelred or some such. She doesn't seem to know, but she doubts it. Shortly after she is gone, wishing us a nice day and convincing us that half an hour touring Wells Cathedral of St.Andrew is probably enough. To be fair, she might just be right.
We find a cafe by the riverside and meet up with the others who had chosen not to take the cathedral tour. Maisie the cathedral cat is patrolling the area very protectively. Several small children try to pull her tail but she remains unphased by their gropings. She merely trotts off to a grassy area away from the cathedral and takes a nap. While we are enjoying a drink a man dressed like a member of the committee at Lords Cricket Ground strolls by. He is delivering some sort of message to a newlywed couple, and in doing so he is making quite a scene. I have absolutely no recall of what he actually says, but the bride is impossibly polite to him and thanks him for his efforts, calling it 'lovely'. The man turns to Emma's dad and asks;
"Care for a poem?"
"No thanks. I'm trying to give them up." he replies.
A little wounded, the man moves along the river to bother his next victim. We would be seeing him again later in the week.
Since Emma and I had the whole of that following week off from work the plan was to spend a few nights in Bath also. As ever when I am involved, what followed was a heady mixture of chaos, farce and shouty Scottish men.
It starts in Bristol. It's quite a long drive to Keinton Mandeville so Emma wants to break it up by staying somewhere along the way. So we check into the Arnos Manor Forestdale Hotel. This isn't a bad little place, but it has to be one of the colder places I have been to in mid-July. An apalling summer isn't helping, but someone somewhere has clearly decided that air conditioning in the restaurant is a good idea. But it's not. It's freezing cold and it feels even colder for the fact that it is all but empty.
There is just one other couple in the restaurant tonight and while I am tucking into my fish and chips I can hear the gentleman complaining to the waiter about immigrants. It's real Daily Mail stuff about how those rotten foreigners have taken all the jobs but the man has managed to miss two superb ironies. Firstly, that the basis of his story centres around a son of his who lives in Australia. Immigration? You bet. Secondly, the waiter unfortunate enough to be listening to the man's archaic ramblings happens to be from South Africa. It's unfathomable how he hasn't realised this since the waiter is chatting away in the kind of accent which makes Kevin Pietersen sound like Boris Johnson. Regardless, the man ploughs on, bemoaning the invasion of foreigners and no doubt the demise of capital punishment. I don't know, I've stopped listening by now.
We return the following morning for breakfast. We are greeted by an incredibly smiley young woman. She looks around the room with a puzzled look on her face as if she doesn't quite know where to place this strange individual who has insisted on bringing a wheelchair to breakfast. Finally she hits upon the brilliant idea of putting us at a table next to the wall, just in behind one that is already occupied by two men. One of the men is decidedly portly, and you can see the crack of his arse from Leeds. He is wearing trousers, but only in the same way that Rihanna wears trousers when she wants to promote a new album. But the man is no Rihanna in visual terms. Not unless Rihanna has put ten stones of weight on and developed a serious problem with body hair since her last performance. Mercifully, I take the seat facing away from butt-crack man, and Emma can't see it either because I am now blocking it out.
There is considerably less meat on a woman sitting just across the room from us. Excess skin puts you off your sausage and egg. The woman is, shall we say, mature, and is as bony as it is possible to be without being in an Indiana Jones or a Sinbad film. I'm finding it hard to look at her, but I'm also finding it hard to look away. I start to feel like Austin Powers looking at Fred Savage's mole. These really are the major issues concerning me from our otherwise uneventful trip to Bristol.
Skipping the journey down to Keinton Mandeville almost completely (we took quite a while to find the cottage itself once we had found the right street because they all look the same) we arrive at the grandly named Coombe Hill Cottage. The path outside is covered entirely in gravel, and the woman we are renting from happens to be at the house and advises us that it will be ready in a couple of hours once they have finished cleaning. She also tells us that the entrance we need to use is around the back of the cottage, which is great news for anyone who thinks pushing a wheelchair on gravel might be fun.
With the car parked and a couple of hours to kill we hobble back down the path out on to the main road and head up the street to find a pub. We stop at a small local shop for local people for reasons I cannot and care not to remember, but I am pleasantly surprised to find that it is only a further minute or two to the pub. The Quarry is a very nice little establishment and it helps that finally, after what seems like three months of solid rain day after day, the sun is beating down. We order a drink and spend a very agreeable hour in the beer garden. The couple of beers I down when we get back to the cottage have an effect, and I'm still asleep when the rest of Emma's family get to there at around tea-time. I had been watching golf also, which might not have been the best way to keep my mind occupied and stave off the lethargy which inevitably results from afternoon drinking. And normally I like golf.
We're not going to elaborate on the evenings in Keinton Mandeville. Principally this is because I find forced fun quite traumatic. I can summarise thus; There were barbecues, quizzes and beer and it was unseasonably cold especially given the warm temperatures in daylight hours. If there was a highlight then for me it was the sight of Emma's one-year-old neice smashing the pinata with a stick and shouting 'whack' with every swing. Then her mother, Emma's sister-in-law, took a turn and knocked the donkey's head clean off with one swing. The head then found it's way around the dinner table and it was all a bit like something out of a Godfather movie. Whack.
So anyway we will stick mostly to the daytime activities because that is when we travelled around and experienced a little of the local south west culture. On Saturday morning, after an interminable wait for everyone to get ready, we venture towards the city of Wells. Test Match Special is on the radio in the car and England are taking a fearful pasting from South Africa. They have been bowled out for 385 and the South Africans are something like 4,384 for no wicket. Or something. Prospects for the team are so bad that the commentators have already started ignoring the action and instead playing word games or making up lists of the best left-handed South Africans and so forth.
Wells is one of the smallest cities in England and is best known for it's cathedral and other religiously associated architecture. Again I must re-iterate my utter disdain for religion, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested. We go into St.Andrew's Cathedral and end up on a short guided tour. The guide is called Elizabeth something or other, and she's informative enough but you get the feeling she wishes she was elsewhere. There are only myself, Emma, her mum and another couple on the tour which, considering it is free, is a pretty poor return. Religion might be crap, but what about history and architecture? It seems that they are not enough to interest the public of Wells today and so we press on in our uncomfortably small group.
Wells Cathedral of St.Andrew is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells who, on the balance of probabilities, does not eat babies. It dates back to the 10th century but now, by far it's most pleasing attribute is it's clock. Alongside the large 24-hour clock face sits a model of a man called Jack. When Jack kicks his legs a series of wooden soldiers on wooden horseback appear from the top of the clock like demented cuckoos. They play out a brief battle in which one soldier is killed, only for him to re-emerge patched up to go through the whole thing again five or six times. It's a kind of mini-purgatory for the poor wooden soldier, but given that he is wooden and therefore devoid of any feelings it is all good, harmless entertainment.
Our guide gives up after around half an hour of shining her torch at the 'monsters' she finds carved into the architecture and speculating on what they may have originally represented. She seems very unsure of herself throughout and is particularly befuddled when one man asks whether Wells Cathedral is the final burial place of King Ethelred or some such. She doesn't seem to know, but she doubts it. Shortly after she is gone, wishing us a nice day and convincing us that half an hour touring Wells Cathedral of St.Andrew is probably enough. To be fair, she might just be right.
We find a cafe by the riverside and meet up with the others who had chosen not to take the cathedral tour. Maisie the cathedral cat is patrolling the area very protectively. Several small children try to pull her tail but she remains unphased by their gropings. She merely trotts off to a grassy area away from the cathedral and takes a nap. While we are enjoying a drink a man dressed like a member of the committee at Lords Cricket Ground strolls by. He is delivering some sort of message to a newlywed couple, and in doing so he is making quite a scene. I have absolutely no recall of what he actually says, but the bride is impossibly polite to him and thanks him for his efforts, calling it 'lovely'. The man turns to Emma's dad and asks;
"Care for a poem?"
"No thanks. I'm trying to give them up." he replies.
A little wounded, the man moves along the river to bother his next victim. We would be seeing him again later in the week.
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Barcelona - Part Three (La Sagrada Familia)
Tuesday. The second day of our bus tour of Barcelona. Having again failed to find anywhere suitable for breakfast (we don't manage a single breakfast in the entire week we are here as it turns out) we are heading towards the Olympic Port, the starting point of the bus tour's alternative route.
Our first destination is La Sagrada Familia. This is the unfinished work of the much talked about Antoni Gaudi, the architect who designed pretty much every significant building in Barcelona, and with whom there is something of an obsession in the city and in Catalonia in general. He's even more popular than One Direction and Justin Bieber. Imagine that. Gaudi knew he wouldn't live long enough to finish his last great masterpiece, but it probably still came as something of a shock when he was knocked down by a tram and killed in 1926. He was 74 years old, and probably not quick enough to get out of the way.
What he did manage to do was leave strict instructions to others working on the project as to how the finished article should look. Eighty-eight years later they still haven't quite managed to fulfill his vision, making it about the longest running project since David Beckham started his GCSE in Spanish. Despite it's incompletion, La Sagrada Familia is still open to visitors, and attracts them in their thousands.
There is an enormous queue as we get off the bus and approach the vast building. Queuing creates a most complex dilemma for wheelchair users. To join or not to join? You never quite know what to do. I've been dragged out of queues by fussy staff, looking at me as if I am from Mars for having taken the ridiculous decision to try to wait in line with the 'normal' people, but I have also been left to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait in queues. Both of these extremes took place on the same day in Berlin airport in December 2010, but that is a story you can read elsewhere on these pages.
We decide to play dumb and ask one of the many tour guides patrolling the line about wheelchair access. Then with a nudge and a wink and a 'know what I mean?' we are ushered to the front of the queue and asked to wait by a small turnstile. Earlier, I had noticed that admission to La Sagrada Familia is 16 Euros each. Normally you would have to pay me to go into a place of worship, but this is in the name of tourism and is therefore different. I needn't have worried as the guide is soon opening a small gate and waving us through without any reference to the small matter of paying to get in.
We are now inside the gates, right in front of this ridiculously large structure. La Sagrada Familia is a basilica, as opposed to a cathedral. Despite appearances, La Sagrada Familia is not a basilica because of it's barely credible massiveness. Rather, and since you insist on knowing the difference, a basilica is a place that has received a Papal blessing. All of which means that Pope Benedict the whatever-he-is approves of it on some level and has publicly demonstrated this. Well, he can't fault the architecture. Unless he is overly fussy about the fact that it is not finished, obviously.
To our right is a small kiosk selling headsets. You could, if you were really troubled by the idea of spending an extra 2 Euros, just go inside La Sagrada Familia and try to find your own way around. After all, it's only an overgrown church, right? However, if like us you haven't spent anything yet and are far too lazy to try to work out for yourself what any of it means then you will be well served by picking up a headset. It provides you with an audio guide, although at certain points during the tour mine keeps stopping as if the commentary is being provided by the same people who edited the clip of John Terry shouting obscenities at Anton Ferdinand. That's problematic enough, but when you are in an environment about which you know precisely nothing it makes things all the more difficult.
I'm not into God. Let me tell you about God. Actually, don't. We'll be here all day with me ranting on about how he never makes anything good happen, only the bad, horrendous shit that I have seen happen to others in my life. In any case I have come to the view that God, while his existence is 99.9% impossible, is an effective placebo. God will never physically help you do anything, but if the mind convinces itself that God exists and that He has made wonderful things happen, then in a roundabout sort of way He has. It's like giving an athlete a suspicious looking pill and telling him that it will make him faster and stronger, and then revealing that it was only a sugar pill. Having believed he was taking something to improve his performance, chances are the athlete's perfomance will have improved. Or in the case of one person I know, sucking on a cider lolly at the age of 12 and believing yourself to be innebriated. God works for some people, despite his lack of basis in reality.
Before we even enter the building we take a wrong turn. Outside La Sagrada Familia (which by the way means the Holy Family) is some very uneven terrain. It's accessible only if you are profficient at pushing up mountains. I am a reasonably mobile wheelchair user but I would not have been able to take certain parts of this tour on my own. This includes my visit to the toilet, which involves rolling down a practically vertical drop masquerading as a ramp, while all the while trying to avoid the scores of people coming out of the toilet areas. I've never been absailing with a crowd around me, but if I did I should imagine it would be something like trying to use the disabled toilets at La Sagrada Familia. Anyway, the wrong turn. Had we turned left we would have reached Point 1 on the tour, the idea being to stop there and take in the views of the 'facade' (front) of the basilica while listening to the description and history behind it. Instead we turned right, only because we couldn't see Point 1 and, with no instructions accompanying the headsets we had purchased, had no concept of Point 1 or Point Anything Else until we had missed Point 1. We turned right because the path to the facade and the front door of La Sagrada Familia looked closer and flatter that way. Basic, basic error.
At this point I could describe the breathtaking architecture, the detailed, beautifully crafted sculptures and their religious and historical significance, but like the Grand Canyon and Dirk Kuyt's first touch, it is something which has to be seen to be believed. My describing it here would be entirely superfluous. To summarise, Jesus is fairly well represented, as are Mary and the Wise Men. And Pontious Pilate. Dirk Kuyt doesn't even make the subs bench, which is the way it should be and always should have been.
Once inside the audio tour comes into it's own. The numbered stopping points have started to make sense to me, althouth there is one occasion when we are instructed to leave the basilica by the open door on our right to view something or other, but look to our right to find no open door, or doors of any description. A look in all other directions tells the same story. There are no open doors leading to anything or anywhere. While looking around in a slight state of confusion I am asked by one staff member to remove my hat. Not being a church person I had forgotten that cricket hats aren't really church-going items of headware. Perhaps I should have brought my trilby. Anyway, I remove my hat feeling a little chastened, and never find the open door of which the audio commentary is still speaking. Near the end of the tour we come across a wonderful irony. A lift that is only accessible to people who can walk up a small flight of steps. To give tourists an even grander view of their surroundings, La Sagrada Familia has two towers, each of which is equipped with a lift to carry visitors to a higher vantage point. Yet the steps leading up to the lift's entrance exclude me.
Regardless, I never before thought it possible to spend two hours of any sort, much less interesting hours, in a place of worship. Until now. The tour is informative (in the main) and the architecture is a modern miracle.
And you have to remember we got in free.
Our first destination is La Sagrada Familia. This is the unfinished work of the much talked about Antoni Gaudi, the architect who designed pretty much every significant building in Barcelona, and with whom there is something of an obsession in the city and in Catalonia in general. He's even more popular than One Direction and Justin Bieber. Imagine that. Gaudi knew he wouldn't live long enough to finish his last great masterpiece, but it probably still came as something of a shock when he was knocked down by a tram and killed in 1926. He was 74 years old, and probably not quick enough to get out of the way.
What he did manage to do was leave strict instructions to others working on the project as to how the finished article should look. Eighty-eight years later they still haven't quite managed to fulfill his vision, making it about the longest running project since David Beckham started his GCSE in Spanish. Despite it's incompletion, La Sagrada Familia is still open to visitors, and attracts them in their thousands.
There is an enormous queue as we get off the bus and approach the vast building. Queuing creates a most complex dilemma for wheelchair users. To join or not to join? You never quite know what to do. I've been dragged out of queues by fussy staff, looking at me as if I am from Mars for having taken the ridiculous decision to try to wait in line with the 'normal' people, but I have also been left to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait in queues. Both of these extremes took place on the same day in Berlin airport in December 2010, but that is a story you can read elsewhere on these pages.
We decide to play dumb and ask one of the many tour guides patrolling the line about wheelchair access. Then with a nudge and a wink and a 'know what I mean?' we are ushered to the front of the queue and asked to wait by a small turnstile. Earlier, I had noticed that admission to La Sagrada Familia is 16 Euros each. Normally you would have to pay me to go into a place of worship, but this is in the name of tourism and is therefore different. I needn't have worried as the guide is soon opening a small gate and waving us through without any reference to the small matter of paying to get in.
We are now inside the gates, right in front of this ridiculously large structure. La Sagrada Familia is a basilica, as opposed to a cathedral. Despite appearances, La Sagrada Familia is not a basilica because of it's barely credible massiveness. Rather, and since you insist on knowing the difference, a basilica is a place that has received a Papal blessing. All of which means that Pope Benedict the whatever-he-is approves of it on some level and has publicly demonstrated this. Well, he can't fault the architecture. Unless he is overly fussy about the fact that it is not finished, obviously.
To our right is a small kiosk selling headsets. You could, if you were really troubled by the idea of spending an extra 2 Euros, just go inside La Sagrada Familia and try to find your own way around. After all, it's only an overgrown church, right? However, if like us you haven't spent anything yet and are far too lazy to try to work out for yourself what any of it means then you will be well served by picking up a headset. It provides you with an audio guide, although at certain points during the tour mine keeps stopping as if the commentary is being provided by the same people who edited the clip of John Terry shouting obscenities at Anton Ferdinand. That's problematic enough, but when you are in an environment about which you know precisely nothing it makes things all the more difficult.
I'm not into God. Let me tell you about God. Actually, don't. We'll be here all day with me ranting on about how he never makes anything good happen, only the bad, horrendous shit that I have seen happen to others in my life. In any case I have come to the view that God, while his existence is 99.9% impossible, is an effective placebo. God will never physically help you do anything, but if the mind convinces itself that God exists and that He has made wonderful things happen, then in a roundabout sort of way He has. It's like giving an athlete a suspicious looking pill and telling him that it will make him faster and stronger, and then revealing that it was only a sugar pill. Having believed he was taking something to improve his performance, chances are the athlete's perfomance will have improved. Or in the case of one person I know, sucking on a cider lolly at the age of 12 and believing yourself to be innebriated. God works for some people, despite his lack of basis in reality.
Before we even enter the building we take a wrong turn. Outside La Sagrada Familia (which by the way means the Holy Family) is some very uneven terrain. It's accessible only if you are profficient at pushing up mountains. I am a reasonably mobile wheelchair user but I would not have been able to take certain parts of this tour on my own. This includes my visit to the toilet, which involves rolling down a practically vertical drop masquerading as a ramp, while all the while trying to avoid the scores of people coming out of the toilet areas. I've never been absailing with a crowd around me, but if I did I should imagine it would be something like trying to use the disabled toilets at La Sagrada Familia. Anyway, the wrong turn. Had we turned left we would have reached Point 1 on the tour, the idea being to stop there and take in the views of the 'facade' (front) of the basilica while listening to the description and history behind it. Instead we turned right, only because we couldn't see Point 1 and, with no instructions accompanying the headsets we had purchased, had no concept of Point 1 or Point Anything Else until we had missed Point 1. We turned right because the path to the facade and the front door of La Sagrada Familia looked closer and flatter that way. Basic, basic error.
At this point I could describe the breathtaking architecture, the detailed, beautifully crafted sculptures and their religious and historical significance, but like the Grand Canyon and Dirk Kuyt's first touch, it is something which has to be seen to be believed. My describing it here would be entirely superfluous. To summarise, Jesus is fairly well represented, as are Mary and the Wise Men. And Pontious Pilate. Dirk Kuyt doesn't even make the subs bench, which is the way it should be and always should have been.
Once inside the audio tour comes into it's own. The numbered stopping points have started to make sense to me, althouth there is one occasion when we are instructed to leave the basilica by the open door on our right to view something or other, but look to our right to find no open door, or doors of any description. A look in all other directions tells the same story. There are no open doors leading to anything or anywhere. While looking around in a slight state of confusion I am asked by one staff member to remove my hat. Not being a church person I had forgotten that cricket hats aren't really church-going items of headware. Perhaps I should have brought my trilby. Anyway, I remove my hat feeling a little chastened, and never find the open door of which the audio commentary is still speaking. Near the end of the tour we come across a wonderful irony. A lift that is only accessible to people who can walk up a small flight of steps. To give tourists an even grander view of their surroundings, La Sagrada Familia has two towers, each of which is equipped with a lift to carry visitors to a higher vantage point. Yet the steps leading up to the lift's entrance exclude me.
Regardless, I never before thought it possible to spend two hours of any sort, much less interesting hours, in a place of worship. Until now. The tour is informative (in the main) and the architecture is a modern miracle.
And you have to remember we got in free.
Tuesday, 10 July 2012
Barcelona - Part Two
Monday, May 28 2012.
We're skipping Sunday. It was a day at the beach, which enjoyable though it was, was never going to be an event. A story. The only thing of note that I feel compelled to report to you was the disturbing practice of fat, hairy men paying to have their fat, hairy bodies massaged by women bonkers enough to offer such a service. No, not me. I'm not hairy.
At the risk of over sensitive types accusing me of some sort of racial slur, I nevertheless feel duty bound to point out also that the women offering this service on the beach in Barcelona all looked to have some kind of Far Eastern origin. I don't know if this is significant or not, it is just a fact. To their credit, they at least had the decency to carry out their irksome task with that weary look of 'it's a job' about their features. Job satisfaction is not something these women seemed to aspire to. Which was handy judging by the client list.
And so back to Monday, and the Nou Camp. The home of Barcelona FC is, I believe, the only place we visited on this trip that we had already explored thoroughly on our last visit here in 2009. I wasn't expecting any major changes in the three years since then. As it turns out there are differences, but they are subtle. In any case, you just can't go to Barcelona for a whole week and not visit the Nou Camp, even if you have seen it only three years previously.
One thing that has not changed is the lack of accessibility to the full stadium tour. Actually, I'm taking a slight liberty there. Last time we visited we were not aware that the stadium tour was inaccessible because we visited on a day when it was closed completely due to a U2 concert being staged that night. Yet if it is not accessible now, then it wasn't accessible then and we just didn't know it. Accessibility is a murky area, but we have not quite reached the stage where things that were once wheelchair friendly suddenly become wheelchair unfriendly. Apart maybe from a few women I know.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that it will be the museum only for us (with a small, unexpected bonus near the end). We get this for a more than reasonable 19 Euros, or 9.50 Euros each. To put this into context it is far less than you would pay at Liverpool where the most recent trophy additions are bordering on antiques, or at Manchester United where there are new trophies but also new fans, than whom there is very little worse in football or even in life itself. The kind of people who will support Chelsea this time next year, or who can tell you all about the treble winning team of 1999 but look at you blankly if you ask about Jimmy Greenhoff or Arthur Graham. Who? Doesn't matter.
Getting from our hotel at Avenue D'Icaria to the Nou Camp involves a couple of bus rides, which you would think would cause all manner of accessibility problems. As those of you who have visited these pages before will know I can't go from Lime Street to St.Helens Central without great risk of ending up in Garswood, and anyone who has been to Garswood will feel that pain instantly. Fortunately, Barcelona is one of the better places I have visited in terms of accessible transportation. The number 14 bus stops right outside Hotel D'Icaria and drops us half way down La Rambla, where there is another stop nearby for the city's tour buses. Unlike in Los Angeles, all of Barcelona's tour buses are fully accessible, and so within an hour or so of leaving the hotel we are at the Nou Camp once more.
We have a late breakfast in Pan's, which is like Subway only nice. All around the restaurant there are television screens, some showing music videos and others showing Barcelona games from various eras. During one, Hristo Stoitchkov is abusing a referee using only hand gestures, while in another Rivaldo is performing sporting miracles which do not involve cheating. A double miracle, if you will.
The gangway leading in to the museum has changed, I notice instantly as we begin. Last time there were various exhibits placed in a row running along the centre of the gangway. Now there are only billboards with adverts. Barcelona is a club which prides itself on it's refusal to jump aboard the commercial gravy train currently dominating football, but if anyone knows how to advertise themselves they do. Most of the billboards advertise the club's own merchandise, others advertise goods used by their players. Boots, energy drinks, shirts, training tops, that kind of crap. Barcelona, run by the fans for the fans, is nevertheless as commercially savvy as Microsoft.
It takes a very long time to get around the museum if, like me, you read everything that you can. I have an interest in history, particularly sporting history, even if I seem to have a total and complete inability to retain the information I learn. So it is with great surprise that I discover that Barcelona was founded by Joan Gamper, along with a group of Swiss, English and Catalan footballers. This is why on the club crest you will find the St.George cross along with the Catalan flag. It does not explain why they have not had an English footballer in their ranks since Gary Lineker, who left in 1989 and can now be found delivering clunkingly awful gags with his other matey ex-pros on Match Of The Day. What explains that phenomenon is that firstly English footballers are terrifyingly over-rated, and also that they are equally overpaid here in England. The English Premier League is now the richest in the world and as such, believes itself the epicentre of all club football. Chelsea's recent bus-parking European Champions League win will have done nothing to dispel this kind of mania.
I digress again. Other stories of interest at the Nou Camp museum include the strange case of Enrique Castro Gonzalez. Quini, as he was known, was kidnapped at gun-point on March 1 1981 and held for 25 days. The police arrested one of Quini's captors when he was on his way to collect the ransom money. Shortly after his release, Quini scored twice in the Copa Del Rey final defeat of his former club Sporting Gijon. The following year, he scored the winner in the European Cup Winners Cup Final against Standard Liege of Belgium. Arguably, kidnapping boosted Quini's career significantly.
One of Barcelona's greats of the late 1950's was a chap called Luis Suarez. Suarez was not Uruguayan but Spanish, the first Spaniard to win the European Footballer Of The Year award. He also helped Spain to win the 1964 European Championship, 44 years before the current generation of Spanish players started to take over the world. As far as the available information at the Nou Camp goes, Suarez never racially abused or bit anyone, nor did he ever celebrate the missing of a penalty which he had deliberately conceded by blatantly slapping the ball away from the goal. None of which stopped Barcelona from flogging him to Inter Milan in 1961 when they were a little bit cash-strapped. He is considered one of Inter's greatest ever players, helping them to two consecutive European Cup successes in 1964 and 1965. Barcelona are really just a selling club.
Not really. They are more than a club. The motto says so. 'Mes Que Un' Club is the message written proudly across the seating one one side of this great stadium, used by the club since 1957. There is also Nike tick on the other side. Commercial? Capitalists? No. Anyway, this brings me around to the little bonus I was telling you about earlier. The presence of Bono and his pals scuppered any chance of seeing the inside of the stadium last time I was here. Emma went in for a sneaky peak but she had to use a couple of steps to do so, and when she got there found that the pitch was invisible due to The Edge's tent. Or something. None of that on this day, however. In the three years since we were last here someone has thought to place a small ramp slightly away from the main stadium viewing area, and I am therefore able to get inside the Nou Camp itself for a look around. Feeling only slightly envious of the people I can see walking along the sidelines and off down the players tunnel while on the full tour, I am still happy enough to be able to view one of the best stadia in world football from an ideal vantage point high up in one of the stands. As much as I love Saints and Super League, it places a little perspective on nights out at Langtree Park.
We get back on the tour bus to explore the Palau Reial de Pedralbes, which until 1931 was the Barcelona residence of the Spanish Royal family. There is a long, gravelly path leading up to it, and the area is decorated with monuments and fountains of some grandeur. However, this Monday is a national public holiday and so it is shut. The door is almost guarded by a statue of Isabella II, Queen of King Alfonso XII. With a beautiful and curious eccentricity, this site is also the home of a ceramics and textiles museum. Which, this being a public holiday and all, is also shut. We take a short stroll around the grounds and head back, where the only place serving anything edible by the time we re-emerge are the fishy restaurants from Saturday night.
But we pass on the Grappa and the bread.
We're skipping Sunday. It was a day at the beach, which enjoyable though it was, was never going to be an event. A story. The only thing of note that I feel compelled to report to you was the disturbing practice of fat, hairy men paying to have their fat, hairy bodies massaged by women bonkers enough to offer such a service. No, not me. I'm not hairy.
At the risk of over sensitive types accusing me of some sort of racial slur, I nevertheless feel duty bound to point out also that the women offering this service on the beach in Barcelona all looked to have some kind of Far Eastern origin. I don't know if this is significant or not, it is just a fact. To their credit, they at least had the decency to carry out their irksome task with that weary look of 'it's a job' about their features. Job satisfaction is not something these women seemed to aspire to. Which was handy judging by the client list.
And so back to Monday, and the Nou Camp. The home of Barcelona FC is, I believe, the only place we visited on this trip that we had already explored thoroughly on our last visit here in 2009. I wasn't expecting any major changes in the three years since then. As it turns out there are differences, but they are subtle. In any case, you just can't go to Barcelona for a whole week and not visit the Nou Camp, even if you have seen it only three years previously.
One thing that has not changed is the lack of accessibility to the full stadium tour. Actually, I'm taking a slight liberty there. Last time we visited we were not aware that the stadium tour was inaccessible because we visited on a day when it was closed completely due to a U2 concert being staged that night. Yet if it is not accessible now, then it wasn't accessible then and we just didn't know it. Accessibility is a murky area, but we have not quite reached the stage where things that were once wheelchair friendly suddenly become wheelchair unfriendly. Apart maybe from a few women I know.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that it will be the museum only for us (with a small, unexpected bonus near the end). We get this for a more than reasonable 19 Euros, or 9.50 Euros each. To put this into context it is far less than you would pay at Liverpool where the most recent trophy additions are bordering on antiques, or at Manchester United where there are new trophies but also new fans, than whom there is very little worse in football or even in life itself. The kind of people who will support Chelsea this time next year, or who can tell you all about the treble winning team of 1999 but look at you blankly if you ask about Jimmy Greenhoff or Arthur Graham. Who? Doesn't matter.
Getting from our hotel at Avenue D'Icaria to the Nou Camp involves a couple of bus rides, which you would think would cause all manner of accessibility problems. As those of you who have visited these pages before will know I can't go from Lime Street to St.Helens Central without great risk of ending up in Garswood, and anyone who has been to Garswood will feel that pain instantly. Fortunately, Barcelona is one of the better places I have visited in terms of accessible transportation. The number 14 bus stops right outside Hotel D'Icaria and drops us half way down La Rambla, where there is another stop nearby for the city's tour buses. Unlike in Los Angeles, all of Barcelona's tour buses are fully accessible, and so within an hour or so of leaving the hotel we are at the Nou Camp once more.
We have a late breakfast in Pan's, which is like Subway only nice. All around the restaurant there are television screens, some showing music videos and others showing Barcelona games from various eras. During one, Hristo Stoitchkov is abusing a referee using only hand gestures, while in another Rivaldo is performing sporting miracles which do not involve cheating. A double miracle, if you will.
The gangway leading in to the museum has changed, I notice instantly as we begin. Last time there were various exhibits placed in a row running along the centre of the gangway. Now there are only billboards with adverts. Barcelona is a club which prides itself on it's refusal to jump aboard the commercial gravy train currently dominating football, but if anyone knows how to advertise themselves they do. Most of the billboards advertise the club's own merchandise, others advertise goods used by their players. Boots, energy drinks, shirts, training tops, that kind of crap. Barcelona, run by the fans for the fans, is nevertheless as commercially savvy as Microsoft.
It takes a very long time to get around the museum if, like me, you read everything that you can. I have an interest in history, particularly sporting history, even if I seem to have a total and complete inability to retain the information I learn. So it is with great surprise that I discover that Barcelona was founded by Joan Gamper, along with a group of Swiss, English and Catalan footballers. This is why on the club crest you will find the St.George cross along with the Catalan flag. It does not explain why they have not had an English footballer in their ranks since Gary Lineker, who left in 1989 and can now be found delivering clunkingly awful gags with his other matey ex-pros on Match Of The Day. What explains that phenomenon is that firstly English footballers are terrifyingly over-rated, and also that they are equally overpaid here in England. The English Premier League is now the richest in the world and as such, believes itself the epicentre of all club football. Chelsea's recent bus-parking European Champions League win will have done nothing to dispel this kind of mania.
I digress again. Other stories of interest at the Nou Camp museum include the strange case of Enrique Castro Gonzalez. Quini, as he was known, was kidnapped at gun-point on March 1 1981 and held for 25 days. The police arrested one of Quini's captors when he was on his way to collect the ransom money. Shortly after his release, Quini scored twice in the Copa Del Rey final defeat of his former club Sporting Gijon. The following year, he scored the winner in the European Cup Winners Cup Final against Standard Liege of Belgium. Arguably, kidnapping boosted Quini's career significantly.
One of Barcelona's greats of the late 1950's was a chap called Luis Suarez. Suarez was not Uruguayan but Spanish, the first Spaniard to win the European Footballer Of The Year award. He also helped Spain to win the 1964 European Championship, 44 years before the current generation of Spanish players started to take over the world. As far as the available information at the Nou Camp goes, Suarez never racially abused or bit anyone, nor did he ever celebrate the missing of a penalty which he had deliberately conceded by blatantly slapping the ball away from the goal. None of which stopped Barcelona from flogging him to Inter Milan in 1961 when they were a little bit cash-strapped. He is considered one of Inter's greatest ever players, helping them to two consecutive European Cup successes in 1964 and 1965. Barcelona are really just a selling club.
Not really. They are more than a club. The motto says so. 'Mes Que Un' Club is the message written proudly across the seating one one side of this great stadium, used by the club since 1957. There is also Nike tick on the other side. Commercial? Capitalists? No. Anyway, this brings me around to the little bonus I was telling you about earlier. The presence of Bono and his pals scuppered any chance of seeing the inside of the stadium last time I was here. Emma went in for a sneaky peak but she had to use a couple of steps to do so, and when she got there found that the pitch was invisible due to The Edge's tent. Or something. None of that on this day, however. In the three years since we were last here someone has thought to place a small ramp slightly away from the main stadium viewing area, and I am therefore able to get inside the Nou Camp itself for a look around. Feeling only slightly envious of the people I can see walking along the sidelines and off down the players tunnel while on the full tour, I am still happy enough to be able to view one of the best stadia in world football from an ideal vantage point high up in one of the stands. As much as I love Saints and Super League, it places a little perspective on nights out at Langtree Park.
We get back on the tour bus to explore the Palau Reial de Pedralbes, which until 1931 was the Barcelona residence of the Spanish Royal family. There is a long, gravelly path leading up to it, and the area is decorated with monuments and fountains of some grandeur. However, this Monday is a national public holiday and so it is shut. The door is almost guarded by a statue of Isabella II, Queen of King Alfonso XII. With a beautiful and curious eccentricity, this site is also the home of a ceramics and textiles museum. Which, this being a public holiday and all, is also shut. We take a short stroll around the grounds and head back, where the only place serving anything edible by the time we re-emerge are the fishy restaurants from Saturday night.
But we pass on the Grappa and the bread.
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
Barcelona - Part One
Yes, I know I said this was finished for good. Clearly, since I am writing this that must mean I am a liar, a cad and a bounder in equal measure. But the bald truth is that my integrity must take a back seat when there is a story to tell, and a week in Barcelona was always going to throw up a few tales.
So here we are. It's the end of May and we're at Hotel D'Icaria, predictably situated on Avenue D'Icaria a couple of miles outside Barcelona city centre, and just five minutes walk (I'm not bothering with the push gag, it's old hat, d'oh!) from one of seven beaches running along the city's coastline. Hotel D'Icaria is very business-like. It's not your typical Spanish holiday resort hotel but then Barcelona isn't your typical Spanish holiday resort destination. Ask the locals and they will tell you that they are not even in Spain, but rather in Catalonia. It's complicated and political, not furtile ground for humour. It's a nice enough hotel, but it isn't going to be offering the level of tacky entertainment found on our trip to Benidorm last August. That might be a good thing. This is proper tourism as opposed to holiday-making. We're not playing games.
We take a stroll beach-wards. Taking a stroll around your surroundings is always one of the first priorities when you are staying somewhere new I find. The beach is impressively accessible and clean, I note, as we move on to the pier. It's lined with restaurants stretching out as far as it is possible to travel without swimwear or a boat. Suitably impressed, we look down over the edge of the pier and there is another level of the marina which is similarly restaurant heavy, with one or two bars dotted around also. At this point we are optimistic about the social opportunities of the area. And we haven't even got within two miles of the city, with La Rambla and all of that.
So a few hours later we return to the marina area to examine restaurant options more closely. It's Saturday, so the plan is to relax with a nice meal and a few cheeky wines tonight, hit the beach tomorrow before starting to visit the city's tourist attractions on Monday. Whereupon we hit our first problem. Seafood. Now it seems kind of obvious that a marina area might have a lot of seafood restaurants, but we had assumed that there might be some variety on offer. Not really. Every single establishment looks as if it is run by Bubba Gump, who divides his time between the running of the restaurant and the capture of large, unappealing sea creatures to serve to his customers. We spend a long time, and clock up a lot of miles, looking for seafood alternatives.
We end up at La Taberna Gallega, on the bottom level of the marina which itself is a very picturesque sight. If it wasn't so tightly jam-packed with boats of all sizes then it might be even more idyllic. There's so little space around the boats that you wonder how they ever make it out to sea. We're ushered into La Taberna Gallega on the promise of free glasses of champagne. I don't even like champagne, but at this point I am so tired of pushing around looking for somewhere that doesn't have crabs (please....) that I'll take whatever else is on offer.
What is on offer is something called Grappa. After our meal and our bottle of wine, which is all very civilised in the end with no sign of any crabs, shrimp, squid, seabass or killer whale, the waiter brings out two short glasses containing a curious, lime green liquid. It looks as thick as glue. If it were a more sensible colour you could paint your walls with it.
'For you, from me.' the waiter announces proudly, as if he has just presented us with a bunch of flowers and the champagne that we were falsely promised earlier. Wine affects me less when it is accompanied by a good meal, but I am still tipsy enough to think that the waiter's lime offering might be worth a go. Nobody has been that mistaken since Ashley Cole thought about writing a book. I can barely describe the taste of Grappa. The smell should have been a clue, but once it passes your lips it's like a wonderous and befuddling fusion of vomit and fire. Like eating a hand grenade coated in snakes venom. Shot glasses are not designed to contain large amounts of liquid, so when I tell you that I only managed to digest half of the contents of my glass you will get some idea of just how little Grappa my insides could stand before they might well have exploded all over the Gingham. I'm not exactly sure if it was Gingham, actually.
Either way it was unpleasant. A further nudge to the nads comes when the bill arrives. We have been charged the equivalent of around £3.90 (the real reason I phrase it so is that I don't actually have a Euro sign on my keyboard, imagine that?) for a plate of bread covered in tomato sauce. We haven't ordered it, it has just been placed there by our friendly waiter when we sit down to look at the menus. A lot of restaurants put bread on your table when you sit down to peruse the menu, but they do so on a complimentary basis, or if they intend to charge they enquire as to whether you might like a plate of bread which has been soiled with the devils own juice, otherwise known as tomato sauce. Not here at La Taberna Gallega. So convinced are they that their bread will be greedily snapped up whatever the price they don't even bother to ask. Ok, so it is only four quid, or a bit less. But isn't it just polite to ask first? Dessert is a chocolate cake between us. We had resisted the temptation to order a whiskey tart. We just giggled at it like 12-year-olds reading the Daily Sport. I have never had a whiskey tart, nor even heard of one before tonight. I have had several hundred vodka tarts but that is another story entirely and one probably not fit for public consumption.
From La Taberna Gallega we move on to a strip of bars which run along the marina towards a large ramp which takes you back on to beach level. It still being reasonably early we decide to take in a bar or two on our way back to the hotel. The first of these is on the corner, naturally, as there seems little point in passing a place that sells alcohol if the next one along looks exactly the same. So we go in. It being so non-descript and rather dark and dingy, I can't actually recall the name of the bar, but we go in to find customers sucking on what can only be described as pipes as opposed to straws, beneath which is a bubbling liquid and from the top of which come great puffs of smoke. My initial thought is of the opium den in the opening scene of 'Once Upon A Time In America'. You know the one? De Niro is lying on a bed half-dead, while a telephone rings over and over and over again. Like the one in my house does when you ring me and I'm absolutely determined not to answer it in case you are a recorded voicemail message from Natwest or some mortgate loans company I have never heard of.
It doesn't look like a very pleasant pastime, whatever it is they are consuming. Probably not up there with Grappa in the vomit-inducing stakes, but something to be avoided nonetheless. Emma enquires as to whether I might like to try one of these bongy creations but I decline, settling instead for a dull, old fashioned bottle of beer. There is a small television in the corner of the room showing an international friendly between France and someone, followed by UFC violence which has more than a tinge of homo-eroticism about it. It's not for me. Much like the bongy concoction, which we later discover is some kind of strawberry flavoured tobacco. Fruit fags? The comedic possibilities here are fairly endless, but I fear you would never get to the bottom of the page if I started teeing off on that one.
From where we are now we can see another row of bars which were not visible from outside the bar. We are under cover in a type of tent area facing these hitherto undiscovered drinking establishments. One of these establishments is filling up with guests on someone's hen night. Pink clothing and lots of it, high hair, too much make up, that kind of thing. What I don't expect is for the bride-to-be to be wheeled in on a bed. Another guest enters the bar in similar fashion some time later and it transpires that there is some kind of doctors and nurses-themed event going on. It all sounds a little too kinky for me, particularly in present company.
I do try and enter the bar later just to use the toilet after several botched attempts to use other toilet facilites elewhere. One proprieter tells me that he is very sorry but he needs the disabled toilet to store great big piles of shite that he doesn't use but doesn't want to throw out. They might be my words, not his, but they are no less accurate than what he comes up with. The man at the hen night bar just shakes his head when I ask him about toilets, as if asking for a disabled toilet in a bar is something akin to asking for a tennis court. So you can come in on a bed and play doctors and nurses, but you can't emtpy your bladder if you don't have the capacity to vacate your wheeled vechile to do so. It's not the first toilet fiasco of the night, having been earlier invited to use the ladies by the manager of La Taberna Gallega because there are steps leading up to the mens. Obviously. I mean why would you need wheelchair access if you have a penis? People who use wheelchairs don't have penises. That's just basic, people.
We retire to Hotel D'Icaria for the night feeling all at once optimistic, bemused, but mostly tired from the travelling and the boozing.
So here we are. It's the end of May and we're at Hotel D'Icaria, predictably situated on Avenue D'Icaria a couple of miles outside Barcelona city centre, and just five minutes walk (I'm not bothering with the push gag, it's old hat, d'oh!) from one of seven beaches running along the city's coastline. Hotel D'Icaria is very business-like. It's not your typical Spanish holiday resort hotel but then Barcelona isn't your typical Spanish holiday resort destination. Ask the locals and they will tell you that they are not even in Spain, but rather in Catalonia. It's complicated and political, not furtile ground for humour. It's a nice enough hotel, but it isn't going to be offering the level of tacky entertainment found on our trip to Benidorm last August. That might be a good thing. This is proper tourism as opposed to holiday-making. We're not playing games.
We take a stroll beach-wards. Taking a stroll around your surroundings is always one of the first priorities when you are staying somewhere new I find. The beach is impressively accessible and clean, I note, as we move on to the pier. It's lined with restaurants stretching out as far as it is possible to travel without swimwear or a boat. Suitably impressed, we look down over the edge of the pier and there is another level of the marina which is similarly restaurant heavy, with one or two bars dotted around also. At this point we are optimistic about the social opportunities of the area. And we haven't even got within two miles of the city, with La Rambla and all of that.
So a few hours later we return to the marina area to examine restaurant options more closely. It's Saturday, so the plan is to relax with a nice meal and a few cheeky wines tonight, hit the beach tomorrow before starting to visit the city's tourist attractions on Monday. Whereupon we hit our first problem. Seafood. Now it seems kind of obvious that a marina area might have a lot of seafood restaurants, but we had assumed that there might be some variety on offer. Not really. Every single establishment looks as if it is run by Bubba Gump, who divides his time between the running of the restaurant and the capture of large, unappealing sea creatures to serve to his customers. We spend a long time, and clock up a lot of miles, looking for seafood alternatives.
We end up at La Taberna Gallega, on the bottom level of the marina which itself is a very picturesque sight. If it wasn't so tightly jam-packed with boats of all sizes then it might be even more idyllic. There's so little space around the boats that you wonder how they ever make it out to sea. We're ushered into La Taberna Gallega on the promise of free glasses of champagne. I don't even like champagne, but at this point I am so tired of pushing around looking for somewhere that doesn't have crabs (please....) that I'll take whatever else is on offer.
What is on offer is something called Grappa. After our meal and our bottle of wine, which is all very civilised in the end with no sign of any crabs, shrimp, squid, seabass or killer whale, the waiter brings out two short glasses containing a curious, lime green liquid. It looks as thick as glue. If it were a more sensible colour you could paint your walls with it.
'For you, from me.' the waiter announces proudly, as if he has just presented us with a bunch of flowers and the champagne that we were falsely promised earlier. Wine affects me less when it is accompanied by a good meal, but I am still tipsy enough to think that the waiter's lime offering might be worth a go. Nobody has been that mistaken since Ashley Cole thought about writing a book. I can barely describe the taste of Grappa. The smell should have been a clue, but once it passes your lips it's like a wonderous and befuddling fusion of vomit and fire. Like eating a hand grenade coated in snakes venom. Shot glasses are not designed to contain large amounts of liquid, so when I tell you that I only managed to digest half of the contents of my glass you will get some idea of just how little Grappa my insides could stand before they might well have exploded all over the Gingham. I'm not exactly sure if it was Gingham, actually.
Either way it was unpleasant. A further nudge to the nads comes when the bill arrives. We have been charged the equivalent of around £3.90 (the real reason I phrase it so is that I don't actually have a Euro sign on my keyboard, imagine that?) for a plate of bread covered in tomato sauce. We haven't ordered it, it has just been placed there by our friendly waiter when we sit down to look at the menus. A lot of restaurants put bread on your table when you sit down to peruse the menu, but they do so on a complimentary basis, or if they intend to charge they enquire as to whether you might like a plate of bread which has been soiled with the devils own juice, otherwise known as tomato sauce. Not here at La Taberna Gallega. So convinced are they that their bread will be greedily snapped up whatever the price they don't even bother to ask. Ok, so it is only four quid, or a bit less. But isn't it just polite to ask first? Dessert is a chocolate cake between us. We had resisted the temptation to order a whiskey tart. We just giggled at it like 12-year-olds reading the Daily Sport. I have never had a whiskey tart, nor even heard of one before tonight. I have had several hundred vodka tarts but that is another story entirely and one probably not fit for public consumption.
From La Taberna Gallega we move on to a strip of bars which run along the marina towards a large ramp which takes you back on to beach level. It still being reasonably early we decide to take in a bar or two on our way back to the hotel. The first of these is on the corner, naturally, as there seems little point in passing a place that sells alcohol if the next one along looks exactly the same. So we go in. It being so non-descript and rather dark and dingy, I can't actually recall the name of the bar, but we go in to find customers sucking on what can only be described as pipes as opposed to straws, beneath which is a bubbling liquid and from the top of which come great puffs of smoke. My initial thought is of the opium den in the opening scene of 'Once Upon A Time In America'. You know the one? De Niro is lying on a bed half-dead, while a telephone rings over and over and over again. Like the one in my house does when you ring me and I'm absolutely determined not to answer it in case you are a recorded voicemail message from Natwest or some mortgate loans company I have never heard of.
It doesn't look like a very pleasant pastime, whatever it is they are consuming. Probably not up there with Grappa in the vomit-inducing stakes, but something to be avoided nonetheless. Emma enquires as to whether I might like to try one of these bongy creations but I decline, settling instead for a dull, old fashioned bottle of beer. There is a small television in the corner of the room showing an international friendly between France and someone, followed by UFC violence which has more than a tinge of homo-eroticism about it. It's not for me. Much like the bongy concoction, which we later discover is some kind of strawberry flavoured tobacco. Fruit fags? The comedic possibilities here are fairly endless, but I fear you would never get to the bottom of the page if I started teeing off on that one.
From where we are now we can see another row of bars which were not visible from outside the bar. We are under cover in a type of tent area facing these hitherto undiscovered drinking establishments. One of these establishments is filling up with guests on someone's hen night. Pink clothing and lots of it, high hair, too much make up, that kind of thing. What I don't expect is for the bride-to-be to be wheeled in on a bed. Another guest enters the bar in similar fashion some time later and it transpires that there is some kind of doctors and nurses-themed event going on. It all sounds a little too kinky for me, particularly in present company.
I do try and enter the bar later just to use the toilet after several botched attempts to use other toilet facilites elewhere. One proprieter tells me that he is very sorry but he needs the disabled toilet to store great big piles of shite that he doesn't use but doesn't want to throw out. They might be my words, not his, but they are no less accurate than what he comes up with. The man at the hen night bar just shakes his head when I ask him about toilets, as if asking for a disabled toilet in a bar is something akin to asking for a tennis court. So you can come in on a bed and play doctors and nurses, but you can't emtpy your bladder if you don't have the capacity to vacate your wheeled vechile to do so. It's not the first toilet fiasco of the night, having been earlier invited to use the ladies by the manager of La Taberna Gallega because there are steps leading up to the mens. Obviously. I mean why would you need wheelchair access if you have a penis? People who use wheelchairs don't have penises. That's just basic, people.
We retire to Hotel D'Icaria for the night feeling all at once optimistic, bemused, but mostly tired from the travelling and the boozing.
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
The Jackson Debate
I'm tired of writing about me. There's nothing left to say. The well is dry. I am quite sure that my current malaise is as dull and uninteresting to you as it is debilitating to me. Let's have a look at someone else's problems instead, shall we?
One man with more than enough on his Russell Grant-sized plate is Dr Conrad Murray. Those of you not too engrossed in fucking TOWIE and the X-Factor to open up a newspaper or switch on a news channel (which is most of you because obviously this blog only attracts intellectual types) will know that Dr Murray is the man who yesterday was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson. He will be sentenced in three weeks time and could serve up to four years in prison.
Yet as with everything relating to Michael Jackson, opinion is divided as to Murray's guilt. The hordes of Jackson fans awaiting the verdict outside the Los Angeles court last night were clearly of the opinion that their idol was taken from them by foul means, while others argue that Murray is merely a scapegoat to help the fanatics deal with their overblown, melodramatic sense of loss. The general public do tend to over-react following the death of a celebrity - witness the hysterical outpourings of grief when Princess Diana was killed in 1997 or the similarly berserk reaction to the death of the tragic but hardly talented Jade Goody in 2009 - and Jackson's untimely passing was always going to provoke this sort of reaction. While many loathed him for his eccentricities, pretensions and his as yet unproven involvement in child abuse (more on which later), Jackson's body of work ensured that he became a legend in his own lifetime. Michael Jackson was a man who, more than most, polarised opinion.
That Murray has now been found in some way responsible for Jackson's death by a court of law might in some ways help protect the star's legacy. He can once again be held up by his supporters as a victim. Poor Michael, bumped off by a shady and/or incompetent medical man who should have known better. Certainly, Murray is guilty of extreme naivity in administering a drug which should only have been used under strict supervision in a hospital, but how much pressure was he under? There are those who would argue that Jackson would have insisted on receiving the drugs on which he was becoming increasingly reliant, and that if Murray had not agreed to these demands then Jackson had the money and the celebrity to find himself a doctor who would. Looking after Jackson was a pretty significant gig for Murray, and not one he would have wanted to lose. Hindsight is always 20/20, but perhaps Murray may now reflect that he would have been better served allowing Jackson to look for another doctor in any case.
Still, as much as Jackson's fans might hope for it, the singer's role as the victim in Murray's crime does not wipe his own slate clean. There is still the very grisly question of those child abuse charges. In 1993 Evan Chandler accused Jackson of sexually abusing his then 13-year-old son Jordan. It is interesting though not entirely compelling to note that it was Evan, and not the child himself who brought the allegations to light. What is more persuasive to my mind is the fact that Evan Chandler agreed to settle this matter financially out of court. The figures vary according to which media source you rely on but the Chandlers received something in the region of $20-25million between them. I remain childless, but can say without hesitation that if I genuinely believed that my child had been abused in this way there would not be enough money in the world to prevent me from seeking justice. Surely any parent in this situation would want to see the perpetrator appropriately punished? We are talking about a huge amount of money, but what price can you put on the physical and psychological well-being of a child not just at the time of the alleged crime, but for years into the future and maybe for the rest of their lives?
But not everybody is satisfied that Jackson is innocent of these charges. The old saying that there is no smoke without fire is often trotted out in relation to some of Jackson's unusual behaviour around children. It is hard to deny that there is something quite odd about a man who, 34 years old at the time of the alleged incidents, spent so much time with adolescents and even admitted in a television interview to letting them share his bed. Jackson may or may not have been guilty of any sexual abuse but he surely should have known that this behaviour was inappropriate and frankly, a little bit weird. Again there will be those who defend this, suggesting that his own abuse during childhood together with his punishing work schedule (Jackson was just 11 when the Jackson 5 recorded their first hit) contributed. He never had a childhood of his own, they will argue, and so was only trying to recreate one as an adult. Maybe, but he was a grown man and grown men are not permitted to behave in this manner without some serious questions being asked. Fuelling the fires against Jackson further are some of his other alleged eccentric behaviours such as keeping chimps as pets, sleeping in oxygen chambers and the multiple facial surgeries which left him dependent on the drugs that eventually killed him. I have heard it said that his surgeons should have stood trial alongside Dr Murray. Either way, some of Jackson's lifestyle choices made him a hate figure for some well before Evan Chandler's name appeared in the newspapers nearly 20 years ago.
And finally to the music. Michael Jackson is not, cannot be to everyone's tastes but it is an undeniable statement of fact that he has made a massive contribution to the music industry. The early years of his solo career produced albums of bewildering quality which sold like the proverbial hot-cakes. 'Thriller' remains the best-selling album of all-time, while 'Off The Wall' and 'Bad' are also musical triumphs which would, had they been achieved by a less controversial individual, have been enough to provide a lasting legacy to rival any of the great composers, never mind any modern contemporaries. He failed palpably to reach that level in the latter years of his troubled life and career but in many ways Jackson had already revolutionised song and dance to the point where now, there are a plethora of high profile stars adored by millions who owe much to him in terms of the way they have been inspired by him.
But perfect, he was not.
One man with more than enough on his Russell Grant-sized plate is Dr Conrad Murray. Those of you not too engrossed in fucking TOWIE and the X-Factor to open up a newspaper or switch on a news channel (which is most of you because obviously this blog only attracts intellectual types) will know that Dr Murray is the man who yesterday was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson. He will be sentenced in three weeks time and could serve up to four years in prison.
Yet as with everything relating to Michael Jackson, opinion is divided as to Murray's guilt. The hordes of Jackson fans awaiting the verdict outside the Los Angeles court last night were clearly of the opinion that their idol was taken from them by foul means, while others argue that Murray is merely a scapegoat to help the fanatics deal with their overblown, melodramatic sense of loss. The general public do tend to over-react following the death of a celebrity - witness the hysterical outpourings of grief when Princess Diana was killed in 1997 or the similarly berserk reaction to the death of the tragic but hardly talented Jade Goody in 2009 - and Jackson's untimely passing was always going to provoke this sort of reaction. While many loathed him for his eccentricities, pretensions and his as yet unproven involvement in child abuse (more on which later), Jackson's body of work ensured that he became a legend in his own lifetime. Michael Jackson was a man who, more than most, polarised opinion.
That Murray has now been found in some way responsible for Jackson's death by a court of law might in some ways help protect the star's legacy. He can once again be held up by his supporters as a victim. Poor Michael, bumped off by a shady and/or incompetent medical man who should have known better. Certainly, Murray is guilty of extreme naivity in administering a drug which should only have been used under strict supervision in a hospital, but how much pressure was he under? There are those who would argue that Jackson would have insisted on receiving the drugs on which he was becoming increasingly reliant, and that if Murray had not agreed to these demands then Jackson had the money and the celebrity to find himself a doctor who would. Looking after Jackson was a pretty significant gig for Murray, and not one he would have wanted to lose. Hindsight is always 20/20, but perhaps Murray may now reflect that he would have been better served allowing Jackson to look for another doctor in any case.
Still, as much as Jackson's fans might hope for it, the singer's role as the victim in Murray's crime does not wipe his own slate clean. There is still the very grisly question of those child abuse charges. In 1993 Evan Chandler accused Jackson of sexually abusing his then 13-year-old son Jordan. It is interesting though not entirely compelling to note that it was Evan, and not the child himself who brought the allegations to light. What is more persuasive to my mind is the fact that Evan Chandler agreed to settle this matter financially out of court. The figures vary according to which media source you rely on but the Chandlers received something in the region of $20-25million between them. I remain childless, but can say without hesitation that if I genuinely believed that my child had been abused in this way there would not be enough money in the world to prevent me from seeking justice. Surely any parent in this situation would want to see the perpetrator appropriately punished? We are talking about a huge amount of money, but what price can you put on the physical and psychological well-being of a child not just at the time of the alleged crime, but for years into the future and maybe for the rest of their lives?
But not everybody is satisfied that Jackson is innocent of these charges. The old saying that there is no smoke without fire is often trotted out in relation to some of Jackson's unusual behaviour around children. It is hard to deny that there is something quite odd about a man who, 34 years old at the time of the alleged incidents, spent so much time with adolescents and even admitted in a television interview to letting them share his bed. Jackson may or may not have been guilty of any sexual abuse but he surely should have known that this behaviour was inappropriate and frankly, a little bit weird. Again there will be those who defend this, suggesting that his own abuse during childhood together with his punishing work schedule (Jackson was just 11 when the Jackson 5 recorded their first hit) contributed. He never had a childhood of his own, they will argue, and so was only trying to recreate one as an adult. Maybe, but he was a grown man and grown men are not permitted to behave in this manner without some serious questions being asked. Fuelling the fires against Jackson further are some of his other alleged eccentric behaviours such as keeping chimps as pets, sleeping in oxygen chambers and the multiple facial surgeries which left him dependent on the drugs that eventually killed him. I have heard it said that his surgeons should have stood trial alongside Dr Murray. Either way, some of Jackson's lifestyle choices made him a hate figure for some well before Evan Chandler's name appeared in the newspapers nearly 20 years ago.
And finally to the music. Michael Jackson is not, cannot be to everyone's tastes but it is an undeniable statement of fact that he has made a massive contribution to the music industry. The early years of his solo career produced albums of bewildering quality which sold like the proverbial hot-cakes. 'Thriller' remains the best-selling album of all-time, while 'Off The Wall' and 'Bad' are also musical triumphs which would, had they been achieved by a less controversial individual, have been enough to provide a lasting legacy to rival any of the great composers, never mind any modern contemporaries. He failed palpably to reach that level in the latter years of his troubled life and career but in many ways Jackson had already revolutionised song and dance to the point where now, there are a plethora of high profile stars adored by millions who owe much to him in terms of the way they have been inspired by him.
But perfect, he was not.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Tales From A Wednesday
I don't know about you but I'm sick of this fucking blog. Have you read the last few entries? I mean, seriously, come on! It's all doom and gloom isn't it? There is nothing to entertain, which was the original aim when I started writing this moronic, manic monotony. I got up, I felt bad, I had a crash and felt several degrees worse, I'm actually clinically depressed blah blah blah. So what if I am? There's plenty of people come up with quality writing while in the midst of an 'episode'. So they're all more talented than me too, but try and get into the spirit will you?
So I'm going to try to write something more cheerful and all I have to go on are the events of today. The trouble is it's just a normal Wednesday. A Wednesday at work when it has been my turn to cover reception for the afternoon. What humour could possibly come from any of that? Well none, actually, and anyway it is a strict rule never to write about work just as it is a strict rule never to write about taking heroine or sleeping with girls on the game. I can only vaguely refer to work (see above example regarding reception) otherwise it just gets too complex and dangerous, like trying to tell your girlfriend that you don't like her new hairstyle. Just don't do it.
So what else have I done today? Well I have been to the gym. Around a month ago I decided to take advantage of an offer for LJMU staff (ooh, careful......) which allows me to visit the gym half price. For £13 a month I can get unlimited access to the myriad of pain-giving machinery that lies within the walls of Lifestyles on Victoria Street. What else am I going to spend £13 a month on anyway, other than heroine and girls on the game? Exactly. I had to have an induction at which a strangely small young man called Dave (why is everyone called Dave?) took me through the hows, the whys and the do-you-mind-if-I-dont's of a training regime. Dave's not a great advert for Lifestyles in terms of his own physique. All of the other instructors are either muscly men or girly girls with impossibly small arses. If I had a psychiatrist (which I desperately need, no doubt) he or she might reasonably ask why, if I had to point out anything about the girls it would be the smallness of their arses. Anyway, Dave is different, Dave represents the man on the street and in a way that works. When you meet Dave you instantly feel better about the fact that your last workout prior to joining the gym was when you moodily threw basketballs at (literally at) a basket on the night you decided to give up playing basketball five years ago. Well that's how exercise ended for me anyway. Raising your heart rate by looking at girly girls with impossiby small arses doesn't count.
The best (or worst depending on which way you look at it) thing about Lifestyles is the arm bike, or the Top-XT as they pretentiously refer to it. Basically it's like an exercise bike for people like me who just can't find it in them to get their legs to move. You operate it by rotating your arms in a forward motion, a bit like doggy paddle only with your fists closed because you're holding on to a handle. Two handles, to be precise. I do 10 minutes on this and the level of resistance goes up and down every two and a half minutes. Dave did tell me exactly why this would benefit me at the induction and I bought into every word. What he didn't tell me is that after three minutes I'd be breathing like Anakin after his fiery dust-up with Obi-Wan. But you can't stop. If you stop it becomes 10 times more difficult to get the thing moving again and you're entering a whole new world of pain. I learned this the hard way, naturally.
In terms of weights machines there is nothing really that can be done in a wheelchair, particularly one which doesn't have brakes. Which is most wheelchairs. Taxi drivers, bus drivers and train guards are regularly aghast when I roll in to position on their particular mode of transport and inform that I don't have any brakes. If I'm feeling sexist and partuclarly lacking in wit I will tell them that brakes are for girls, but the real reason I don't have them is that I have experienced the near self-harming agony that is trapping one's fingers in said brakes on too many occasions. Frankly, they just get in the way and I would much rather take my chances that I will roll down the bus aisle and out of the emergency exit onto the St.Helens Linkway than put my fingers anywhere near those contraptions ever again. My legs don't work, I really need my hands and fingers. So, back to the weights machines.
Unfortunately for the less mobile than me it is necessary to transfer from my wheelchair on to the seat to use the chest press, shoulder press, pec-deck and vertical something or other. What is more, if you are small like me you have to raise the adjustable seat to it's highest possible point in order to get your body in the right position for the exercise to work properly. On more than one occasion I have failed to lock the seat properly and have found myself suddenly, sharply and without warning slumping down two feet towards the ground mid-lift. Every time a disabled person has a minorly dangerous episode of this nature the able bodied general public react as if we have just been pushed parachute-less out of a helicopter. It doesn't matter how many times you explain that you are ok and that your arse hasn't actually left the seat, able bodied people will never fail to be mortified by this kind of thing. Many of them compound this by trying to help in some way, like the train driver who saw me pull up on to my back wheels to prepare to roll down the ramp to leave the train, didn't like the look of what I was doing (although I do it almost every day) and decided it might be a good idea to try and instead pull me down the ramp by my shoulders from in front of me. I nearly died. Note to all able-bodied people: If I am not bleeding and all my limbs remain attached, don't try to fucking help me, ok?
All the machines at Lifestyles are operated with a key which contains all the information about your training programme and allows you to access training results at the end of the session. I'm still trying to persuade Dave that it would be useful if he could programme my key to let me know how far I have travelled on the arm-bike (sorry, Top-XT) each session, but he just keeps repeating that if I want the resistance altering I just need to tell him. Thanks. It's all a bit of a pity because the training results have 'neat' little diagrams showing a Tour De France map and the Statue Of Liberty which are a half-way interesting way of showing you how you have done that day. If only Dave could be arsed to tell me what the rest of it all means, strength index, performance index, all of that crap. He steadfastly refuses but to be fair he has got his hands full making sure I don't hurt myself. Though he didn't apply that logic to the last female customer I saw enduring one of his inductions. I don't know what he had said to her but she was genuinely in tears. Poor girl, the gym hurts.
On the way home I was approached by a youth dressed as a clown. I say youth because his mask and clown suit made it difficult to tell how old he was but surely nobody over the age of 12 would engage in such shenannigans just because the date happens to be within a week of October 31. His mission to scare the living shit out of me failed only because I saw him coming from hundreds of yards away around the corner. By the time he got close enough to growl at me and thrust his mock dagger (I know?) in my direction the whole thing was about as scary as Andrew Flintoff in a tent. What was of more concern was the distinct smell of dog turd which prevailed throughout the journey back from the train station and the brief conversation I had with a friend about his gambling problems. I arrived home to find that the last number calling my home phone was my home phone number, and during the writing of this entry the phone rang again, and again it was my home number which apparently called. I'm so glad I pay BT so much for their excellent service.
Just another Wednesday, then.
So I'm going to try to write something more cheerful and all I have to go on are the events of today. The trouble is it's just a normal Wednesday. A Wednesday at work when it has been my turn to cover reception for the afternoon. What humour could possibly come from any of that? Well none, actually, and anyway it is a strict rule never to write about work just as it is a strict rule never to write about taking heroine or sleeping with girls on the game. I can only vaguely refer to work (see above example regarding reception) otherwise it just gets too complex and dangerous, like trying to tell your girlfriend that you don't like her new hairstyle. Just don't do it.
So what else have I done today? Well I have been to the gym. Around a month ago I decided to take advantage of an offer for LJMU staff (ooh, careful......) which allows me to visit the gym half price. For £13 a month I can get unlimited access to the myriad of pain-giving machinery that lies within the walls of Lifestyles on Victoria Street. What else am I going to spend £13 a month on anyway, other than heroine and girls on the game? Exactly. I had to have an induction at which a strangely small young man called Dave (why is everyone called Dave?) took me through the hows, the whys and the do-you-mind-if-I-dont's of a training regime. Dave's not a great advert for Lifestyles in terms of his own physique. All of the other instructors are either muscly men or girly girls with impossibly small arses. If I had a psychiatrist (which I desperately need, no doubt) he or she might reasonably ask why, if I had to point out anything about the girls it would be the smallness of their arses. Anyway, Dave is different, Dave represents the man on the street and in a way that works. When you meet Dave you instantly feel better about the fact that your last workout prior to joining the gym was when you moodily threw basketballs at (literally at) a basket on the night you decided to give up playing basketball five years ago. Well that's how exercise ended for me anyway. Raising your heart rate by looking at girly girls with impossiby small arses doesn't count.
The best (or worst depending on which way you look at it) thing about Lifestyles is the arm bike, or the Top-XT as they pretentiously refer to it. Basically it's like an exercise bike for people like me who just can't find it in them to get their legs to move. You operate it by rotating your arms in a forward motion, a bit like doggy paddle only with your fists closed because you're holding on to a handle. Two handles, to be precise. I do 10 minutes on this and the level of resistance goes up and down every two and a half minutes. Dave did tell me exactly why this would benefit me at the induction and I bought into every word. What he didn't tell me is that after three minutes I'd be breathing like Anakin after his fiery dust-up with Obi-Wan. But you can't stop. If you stop it becomes 10 times more difficult to get the thing moving again and you're entering a whole new world of pain. I learned this the hard way, naturally.
In terms of weights machines there is nothing really that can be done in a wheelchair, particularly one which doesn't have brakes. Which is most wheelchairs. Taxi drivers, bus drivers and train guards are regularly aghast when I roll in to position on their particular mode of transport and inform that I don't have any brakes. If I'm feeling sexist and partuclarly lacking in wit I will tell them that brakes are for girls, but the real reason I don't have them is that I have experienced the near self-harming agony that is trapping one's fingers in said brakes on too many occasions. Frankly, they just get in the way and I would much rather take my chances that I will roll down the bus aisle and out of the emergency exit onto the St.Helens Linkway than put my fingers anywhere near those contraptions ever again. My legs don't work, I really need my hands and fingers. So, back to the weights machines.
Unfortunately for the less mobile than me it is necessary to transfer from my wheelchair on to the seat to use the chest press, shoulder press, pec-deck and vertical something or other. What is more, if you are small like me you have to raise the adjustable seat to it's highest possible point in order to get your body in the right position for the exercise to work properly. On more than one occasion I have failed to lock the seat properly and have found myself suddenly, sharply and without warning slumping down two feet towards the ground mid-lift. Every time a disabled person has a minorly dangerous episode of this nature the able bodied general public react as if we have just been pushed parachute-less out of a helicopter. It doesn't matter how many times you explain that you are ok and that your arse hasn't actually left the seat, able bodied people will never fail to be mortified by this kind of thing. Many of them compound this by trying to help in some way, like the train driver who saw me pull up on to my back wheels to prepare to roll down the ramp to leave the train, didn't like the look of what I was doing (although I do it almost every day) and decided it might be a good idea to try and instead pull me down the ramp by my shoulders from in front of me. I nearly died. Note to all able-bodied people: If I am not bleeding and all my limbs remain attached, don't try to fucking help me, ok?
All the machines at Lifestyles are operated with a key which contains all the information about your training programme and allows you to access training results at the end of the session. I'm still trying to persuade Dave that it would be useful if he could programme my key to let me know how far I have travelled on the arm-bike (sorry, Top-XT) each session, but he just keeps repeating that if I want the resistance altering I just need to tell him. Thanks. It's all a bit of a pity because the training results have 'neat' little diagrams showing a Tour De France map and the Statue Of Liberty which are a half-way interesting way of showing you how you have done that day. If only Dave could be arsed to tell me what the rest of it all means, strength index, performance index, all of that crap. He steadfastly refuses but to be fair he has got his hands full making sure I don't hurt myself. Though he didn't apply that logic to the last female customer I saw enduring one of his inductions. I don't know what he had said to her but she was genuinely in tears. Poor girl, the gym hurts.
On the way home I was approached by a youth dressed as a clown. I say youth because his mask and clown suit made it difficult to tell how old he was but surely nobody over the age of 12 would engage in such shenannigans just because the date happens to be within a week of October 31. His mission to scare the living shit out of me failed only because I saw him coming from hundreds of yards away around the corner. By the time he got close enough to growl at me and thrust his mock dagger (I know?) in my direction the whole thing was about as scary as Andrew Flintoff in a tent. What was of more concern was the distinct smell of dog turd which prevailed throughout the journey back from the train station and the brief conversation I had with a friend about his gambling problems. I arrived home to find that the last number calling my home phone was my home phone number, and during the writing of this entry the phone rang again, and again it was my home number which apparently called. I'm so glad I pay BT so much for their excellent service.
Just another Wednesday, then.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Binning The Booze
I was off sick on Tuesday. I didn't have a fever, a bug or a biffy water infection. I was depressed. Mentally unwell, if you will.
I'm aware to some that seems ridiculous, overly dramatic, attention seeking, whatever. It's how I felt, and hauling myself out of bed and dragging my sorry arse to work that day seemed impossible. There are several contributing factors to how I arrived in this desperate state, some of which I don't even want to talk about here. These pages are supposed to be candid, open and honest, warts and all. But if I had to rake over some of that shit again now I might not make it to the bottom of the page.
And nor would you.
So let's stick to what we can control, shall we? Booze. On Tuesday morning I had just come off the back of a weekend in Bristol during which I drank far too much. Lager and red wine flowed generously for three consecutive nights, the last of these being Sunday when Emma and I were the last ones left and went for a meal at La Tasca. It is little wonder that my recent problems felt immeasurably magnified. It is now Thursday, and nothing has changed other than the fact that I have not had any more alcohol. While I would stop short of suggesting that I am ready to dance the lambada bollock naked on top of the Liver building, it would be wrong also to deny that I feel better.
I know this because something happened at work yesterday which, if I had come back to it on Tuesday, would have pushed me over the edge. As it was it wasn't pretty and it did affect me, but not nearly as much as it might have done had it taken place a day earlier. Basically I screwed up, not for the first (nor probably last) time. I apologised but there was obvious disappointment all round. Yet I handled it reasonably well, managing at least to avoid plunging into mental meltdown. Progress, considering the hopelessness of Tuesday morning.
So I've decided to stop drinking. Completely. That is altogther. The first test of my ability or otherwise to do this will come tomorrow (Friday). Liverpool John Moores University are the Revolution COW (Company Of The Week, clever eh? No) and as such we are all eligible for 2 for 1 deals on food and drink up until 8.00pm. Now the old me, or me as I am otherwise known to myself, would have seen this as a wonderful opportunity to get twice as lashed for half the price. Instead I am viewing it only as an opportunity to prove to an unsuspecting work force that I am capable of acting sensibly and soberly on a Friday night.
And I will do it. I have never felt motivated to stop drinking, no matter what ridiculous scrapes I have got myself into in the past. I've always been rescued by my delusion and my sense of 'ooh it'll all blow over, is it Friday yet?'. No more. Now I have the motiviation that has always been missing. My recent malaise has finally taught me that the consequences of drinking myself into a stupor are far too grave. That it has taken me 17 years to realise this is a moot point. It is better late than never, is it not?
One can only hope.
I'm aware to some that seems ridiculous, overly dramatic, attention seeking, whatever. It's how I felt, and hauling myself out of bed and dragging my sorry arse to work that day seemed impossible. There are several contributing factors to how I arrived in this desperate state, some of which I don't even want to talk about here. These pages are supposed to be candid, open and honest, warts and all. But if I had to rake over some of that shit again now I might not make it to the bottom of the page.
And nor would you.
So let's stick to what we can control, shall we? Booze. On Tuesday morning I had just come off the back of a weekend in Bristol during which I drank far too much. Lager and red wine flowed generously for three consecutive nights, the last of these being Sunday when Emma and I were the last ones left and went for a meal at La Tasca. It is little wonder that my recent problems felt immeasurably magnified. It is now Thursday, and nothing has changed other than the fact that I have not had any more alcohol. While I would stop short of suggesting that I am ready to dance the lambada bollock naked on top of the Liver building, it would be wrong also to deny that I feel better.
I know this because something happened at work yesterday which, if I had come back to it on Tuesday, would have pushed me over the edge. As it was it wasn't pretty and it did affect me, but not nearly as much as it might have done had it taken place a day earlier. Basically I screwed up, not for the first (nor probably last) time. I apologised but there was obvious disappointment all round. Yet I handled it reasonably well, managing at least to avoid plunging into mental meltdown. Progress, considering the hopelessness of Tuesday morning.
So I've decided to stop drinking. Completely. That is altogther. The first test of my ability or otherwise to do this will come tomorrow (Friday). Liverpool John Moores University are the Revolution COW (Company Of The Week, clever eh? No) and as such we are all eligible for 2 for 1 deals on food and drink up until 8.00pm. Now the old me, or me as I am otherwise known to myself, would have seen this as a wonderful opportunity to get twice as lashed for half the price. Instead I am viewing it only as an opportunity to prove to an unsuspecting work force that I am capable of acting sensibly and soberly on a Friday night.
And I will do it. I have never felt motivated to stop drinking, no matter what ridiculous scrapes I have got myself into in the past. I've always been rescued by my delusion and my sense of 'ooh it'll all blow over, is it Friday yet?'. No more. Now I have the motiviation that has always been missing. My recent malaise has finally taught me that the consequences of drinking myself into a stupor are far too grave. That it has taken me 17 years to realise this is a moot point. It is better late than never, is it not?
One can only hope.
Monday, 17 October 2011
Back To Bristol
Emma's niece Elizabeth celebrates her first birthday this week. It's a doubly special week in her young life as this was also the weekend of her christening.
Now my religious views (or lack thereof) have been made abundantly clear elsewhere on these pages so I'm not going to bore you with them now. Suffice it to say that my feelings on this have only been enhanced and strengthened by the steaming turdiness of how I have been feeling since the early part of last week. Yet family is family and so it was one's duty to drag oneself off the metaphorical canvas and go down to Bristol for a few days and bloody well enjoy it! Even the churchy bit.
Surprisingly I did. Well maybe not so much the churchy bit. To my mind the female vicar ranted on for far too long about things which seemed to me to have little to do with Elizabeth's christening. In parts she was like a humourless version of Dawn French's Geraldine Grainger from The Vicar of Dibley. As Godmother Emma had had to get to the church early and so by the time we left, it was all I could do not to rip my eyeballs out. Of paticular irritation to me was the lady who came around at the end with a small velvet bag in which, so I am led to believe, we were expected to drop any spare change. Actual hard-earned English currency. To the church. To a God that, if he does exist, is ritually torturing me. I'm sorry, I said I wouldn't witter on about the church but I really do feel THAT bad right now.
So back to the good stuff then. We arrived Friday afternoon following an uneventful journey save for the two or so hours that I refused to speak to Emma because she wouldn't let me play my Joss Stone album in the car. I'm not sure if she actually noticed that I wasn't speaking to her, you would have to ask her. Anyway, the point is that it takes 40 minutes to listen to that album and 40 minutes is not a large sacrifice if it's going to make me feel better. Sadly I am in too much of a savagely desperate state of mind to believe that arguing points like this does any good. So I left it, and we listened to Journey or whatever it was instead. And my blood boiled and my head ached. Over an album. I'm really not all that well. Did I say this was the good stuff?
It's not, but I promise there is some. We met up with Emma's parents Roland and Susan for a few drinks on Friday night. We went to a Wetherspoons known as The Commerical Rooms in which every seat was taken, and which had taken about 20 minutes to get to thanks to some interesting navigation on Roland's part. When we did find a table and settle down with our drinks it was all very agreeable and nice, even the bit where I announced to everyone that I was going to quit drinking next week because it's killing me. With simply perfect timing, it was in the midst of this conversation (nobody thought it a bad idea, by the way) that a man dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel came over and offered us free glasses of sparkiing white wine. Even in the last throes of my life as a stupid, retarded heavy drinker I can not bring myself to consume white wine, but I took a glass anyway safe in the knowledge that one of my companions would find it a good home. I was not wrong. Amusingly, Isambard offered me a glass but then had to go back to the bar to fetch another one as the only one remaining on his tray was his. Drinking on the job Isambard? Brunel achieved many great things in his lifetime, so maybe alcohol doesn't ruin everything for everyone. But I'm still quitting, so fuck you.
We moved on to the Harbour and took in a couple of bars overlooking the River Avon. This was a place we hadn't managed to reach on any of our previous visits to Bristol to see Elizabeth and the family but I'm glad we did on this occasion. It's very picturesque and the bars we went in were populated and atmospheric without ever taking on the heaving horror of say.......that one bar that used to sit at the end of Wembley Way.......on Challenge Cup Final day when the only other place you could get a beer was Tesco. We talked about all the usual things, the fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday and Rotherham United being particularly prominent, aswell as plans for the following night and how we were all looking forward to everyone getting together. We moved on to Las Iguanas where I wolfed down some extremely spicy chicken wings and then sat back and felt the burn. Well, it was better than some of the other things I'd been feeling that's for sure.
Saturday morning we pursued our dogged interest in experiencing as many city bus tours as one lifetime will allow. After a quick bacon buttie for breakfast we enjoyed a small victory when we found the bus to be accessible and more or less on time. Our driver was Bob, and he almost drove past us, lamely explaining that he couldn't get the bus near to the kerb because there were too many other buses in the area. It transpires that they have moved the bus stops and Bob thinks it's a nightmare. Either Bob is fond of overstatement, or he really does have a wonderful life in which the inability to park a bus by a kerb can be considered nightmarish. His beautiful assistant was Pam, the tour guide who took us through the points of interest or otherwise on our journey through Bristol and in partiucular, Clifton. We enjoyed several views of the Clifton Suspension Bridge without ever actually using it, while Pam regaled us with stories of the city's great history and introduced us to it's fantastical architecture. Unfortunately time was short as we had agreed to meet Roland and Susan, and Emma's brother Andrew in time to see Liverpool play Manchester United.
We did so in a harbourside bar but the view was, shall we say, restricted. There were only two small screens, one of which was partly obstructed by a pillar in the style of a traditionally old-fashioned football stadium. Our seat was also some distance from the screens, so concentration on the match was difficult. What's more, the others left at half-time, instructing us to meet them at somewhere called the V-Shed, further up the Harbour at 7.00. We just about managed to stay until the end of the 1-1 draw, then sneaked in a cheeky kip before re-emerging at the agreed meeting point.
Everyone else was late, naturally, but soon enough friends and relatives started to arrive. Emma's uncle Chris is a particularly engaging fellow, and I managed to take my mind off my melancholy as we moved on to Bella Italia and what can only be described as a 'shit-load' of red wine. Chris is a straight-talking sort of guy, the kind of character with which Yorkshiremen are routinely saddled. But in his case it is true. He was telling it like it is the whole night and I couldn't help but enjoy his forthrightness and no-bullshit approach. We ended up having a drunken, decidely low-brow debate about the wonder and majesty of the Grand Canyon which we had both been lucky enough to experience recently. Chris's daughter Louise is getting married next September and Emma said something to me later about her asking if I would sing at the wedding. I couldn't tell whether Emma was joking or not, or whether Louise had been joking. It was all very confusing, but either way I'm quite sure nobody wants Uncle Kracker turning up on their big day. Besides, it's 11 months away and I can't guarantee my safety for the next 11 minutes, frankly.
After Sunday's elongated ceremony I spent more time righting the wrongs of the world with my friend Chris, and also trying to explain to Emma's sports-mad uncle Ray how Saints managed to lose last week's Grand Final. It really wasn't something I wanted to relive but I battled on gamely, offering excuses about a young team in need of more experience, and how they managed to have the misfortune to run into a rejuvenated Rob Burrow. That might not mean much to some of you but Ray understood every word. He's a very quiet, nice fellow but if there is one thing that can enthuse him it is sport and anything related to it. He's a regular at Rotherham United, which makes me feel somewhat ashamed of whinging about my suffering with St.Helens and anyway I can assure you that things have got much worse since then. So I'll stop. We lost, that's it.
And so the last word on the weekend should go to the star of the show, Elizabeth. Blissfully unaware of the reason for all of this fuss she spent Sunday afternoon entertaining the crowd doing 'Things That Babies Do'. Crawling around towards places she probably shouldn't go with a total lack of regard for any possible danger. Climbing up on the first thing available to show everyone how close she is to standing and walking on her own. Pulling funny faces, staring at stupid adults who have no idea what to say to a child. You know the sort of thing, all done looking resplendent in red.
Happy Birthday Elizabeth.
Now my religious views (or lack thereof) have been made abundantly clear elsewhere on these pages so I'm not going to bore you with them now. Suffice it to say that my feelings on this have only been enhanced and strengthened by the steaming turdiness of how I have been feeling since the early part of last week. Yet family is family and so it was one's duty to drag oneself off the metaphorical canvas and go down to Bristol for a few days and bloody well enjoy it! Even the churchy bit.
Surprisingly I did. Well maybe not so much the churchy bit. To my mind the female vicar ranted on for far too long about things which seemed to me to have little to do with Elizabeth's christening. In parts she was like a humourless version of Dawn French's Geraldine Grainger from The Vicar of Dibley. As Godmother Emma had had to get to the church early and so by the time we left, it was all I could do not to rip my eyeballs out. Of paticular irritation to me was the lady who came around at the end with a small velvet bag in which, so I am led to believe, we were expected to drop any spare change. Actual hard-earned English currency. To the church. To a God that, if he does exist, is ritually torturing me. I'm sorry, I said I wouldn't witter on about the church but I really do feel THAT bad right now.
So back to the good stuff then. We arrived Friday afternoon following an uneventful journey save for the two or so hours that I refused to speak to Emma because she wouldn't let me play my Joss Stone album in the car. I'm not sure if she actually noticed that I wasn't speaking to her, you would have to ask her. Anyway, the point is that it takes 40 minutes to listen to that album and 40 minutes is not a large sacrifice if it's going to make me feel better. Sadly I am in too much of a savagely desperate state of mind to believe that arguing points like this does any good. So I left it, and we listened to Journey or whatever it was instead. And my blood boiled and my head ached. Over an album. I'm really not all that well. Did I say this was the good stuff?
It's not, but I promise there is some. We met up with Emma's parents Roland and Susan for a few drinks on Friday night. We went to a Wetherspoons known as The Commerical Rooms in which every seat was taken, and which had taken about 20 minutes to get to thanks to some interesting navigation on Roland's part. When we did find a table and settle down with our drinks it was all very agreeable and nice, even the bit where I announced to everyone that I was going to quit drinking next week because it's killing me. With simply perfect timing, it was in the midst of this conversation (nobody thought it a bad idea, by the way) that a man dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel came over and offered us free glasses of sparkiing white wine. Even in the last throes of my life as a stupid, retarded heavy drinker I can not bring myself to consume white wine, but I took a glass anyway safe in the knowledge that one of my companions would find it a good home. I was not wrong. Amusingly, Isambard offered me a glass but then had to go back to the bar to fetch another one as the only one remaining on his tray was his. Drinking on the job Isambard? Brunel achieved many great things in his lifetime, so maybe alcohol doesn't ruin everything for everyone. But I'm still quitting, so fuck you.
We moved on to the Harbour and took in a couple of bars overlooking the River Avon. This was a place we hadn't managed to reach on any of our previous visits to Bristol to see Elizabeth and the family but I'm glad we did on this occasion. It's very picturesque and the bars we went in were populated and atmospheric without ever taking on the heaving horror of say.......that one bar that used to sit at the end of Wembley Way.......on Challenge Cup Final day when the only other place you could get a beer was Tesco. We talked about all the usual things, the fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday and Rotherham United being particularly prominent, aswell as plans for the following night and how we were all looking forward to everyone getting together. We moved on to Las Iguanas where I wolfed down some extremely spicy chicken wings and then sat back and felt the burn. Well, it was better than some of the other things I'd been feeling that's for sure.
Saturday morning we pursued our dogged interest in experiencing as many city bus tours as one lifetime will allow. After a quick bacon buttie for breakfast we enjoyed a small victory when we found the bus to be accessible and more or less on time. Our driver was Bob, and he almost drove past us, lamely explaining that he couldn't get the bus near to the kerb because there were too many other buses in the area. It transpires that they have moved the bus stops and Bob thinks it's a nightmare. Either Bob is fond of overstatement, or he really does have a wonderful life in which the inability to park a bus by a kerb can be considered nightmarish. His beautiful assistant was Pam, the tour guide who took us through the points of interest or otherwise on our journey through Bristol and in partiucular, Clifton. We enjoyed several views of the Clifton Suspension Bridge without ever actually using it, while Pam regaled us with stories of the city's great history and introduced us to it's fantastical architecture. Unfortunately time was short as we had agreed to meet Roland and Susan, and Emma's brother Andrew in time to see Liverpool play Manchester United.
We did so in a harbourside bar but the view was, shall we say, restricted. There were only two small screens, one of which was partly obstructed by a pillar in the style of a traditionally old-fashioned football stadium. Our seat was also some distance from the screens, so concentration on the match was difficult. What's more, the others left at half-time, instructing us to meet them at somewhere called the V-Shed, further up the Harbour at 7.00. We just about managed to stay until the end of the 1-1 draw, then sneaked in a cheeky kip before re-emerging at the agreed meeting point.
Everyone else was late, naturally, but soon enough friends and relatives started to arrive. Emma's uncle Chris is a particularly engaging fellow, and I managed to take my mind off my melancholy as we moved on to Bella Italia and what can only be described as a 'shit-load' of red wine. Chris is a straight-talking sort of guy, the kind of character with which Yorkshiremen are routinely saddled. But in his case it is true. He was telling it like it is the whole night and I couldn't help but enjoy his forthrightness and no-bullshit approach. We ended up having a drunken, decidely low-brow debate about the wonder and majesty of the Grand Canyon which we had both been lucky enough to experience recently. Chris's daughter Louise is getting married next September and Emma said something to me later about her asking if I would sing at the wedding. I couldn't tell whether Emma was joking or not, or whether Louise had been joking. It was all very confusing, but either way I'm quite sure nobody wants Uncle Kracker turning up on their big day. Besides, it's 11 months away and I can't guarantee my safety for the next 11 minutes, frankly.
After Sunday's elongated ceremony I spent more time righting the wrongs of the world with my friend Chris, and also trying to explain to Emma's sports-mad uncle Ray how Saints managed to lose last week's Grand Final. It really wasn't something I wanted to relive but I battled on gamely, offering excuses about a young team in need of more experience, and how they managed to have the misfortune to run into a rejuvenated Rob Burrow. That might not mean much to some of you but Ray understood every word. He's a very quiet, nice fellow but if there is one thing that can enthuse him it is sport and anything related to it. He's a regular at Rotherham United, which makes me feel somewhat ashamed of whinging about my suffering with St.Helens and anyway I can assure you that things have got much worse since then. So I'll stop. We lost, that's it.
And so the last word on the weekend should go to the star of the show, Elizabeth. Blissfully unaware of the reason for all of this fuss she spent Sunday afternoon entertaining the crowd doing 'Things That Babies Do'. Crawling around towards places she probably shouldn't go with a total lack of regard for any possible danger. Climbing up on the first thing available to show everyone how close she is to standing and walking on her own. Pulling funny faces, staring at stupid adults who have no idea what to say to a child. You know the sort of thing, all done looking resplendent in red.
Happy Birthday Elizabeth.
Monday, 10 October 2011
36
Two days ago I had another of those birthday things. I got another year older. Another year without succumbing to chronic kidney failure or my neurosis. Can you die of neurosis? Anyway, seems like kind of a moot point since I'm not dead.
It was supposed to be a celebration. It happened to coincide with the Super League Grand Final, an event which saw the Super Mighty Saints (they're officially called that, you know?) take on Dirty Leeds Rhinos for the fourth time in five years. We'd lost all of the previous three, aswell as last year's Grand Final against the even dirtier, downright filthy Wigan Warriors. Surely this would be our year, and what with it being my birthday and all?
Well no actually. We lost again. Stunningly and explicably, given that we were eight points up and cruising with about 20 minutes left. Well, maybe not cruising. Chugging along in a half way satisfactory fashion. Rumour has it that when Michael Shenton scored in the corner to give us a bit of breathing space I actually smiled. May even have punched the air. These reports are of course unconfirmed, and in the cold light of day I should like to deny them strenuously.
In light of what followed in the 20 or so minutes after Shenton's try I would like to request to the RFL and Super League that they do not schedule any more Grand Finals for October 8. Instead, I propose that next time October 8 falls on a Saturday that, should the SMS's be involved, the Grand Final be cancelled and the trophy just be handed to our opponents. Even if it's Wigan or Leeds. Especially if it's Wigan or Leeds. But in secret, in a discreet manner so we don't have to witness it. It's going to happen again in 2016 and, quite frankly, I'm not sure this is far enough into the future for comfort. I'll only be 41 then, and even on this most pessimistic of Mondays I am still reasonably confident that I will still be here to have to bear it. At the current rate, I could be sat there watching us lose our 10th successive Grand Final. All of which really is too awful a thought to even entertain. Honestly, it was like watching your wife sleep with your worst enemy. Ok, it was like watching your mistress sleep with your worst enemy. Excruciating. And all made worse by consuming the kind of quantities of lager normally reserved for Wayne and Waynetta.
Now it is just possible that some people (mostly men) take their sport too seriously. It really is only a game. Except it's not. Not really. At this point, under this kind of stress and pumped full of that amount of alcohol you start posting your every thought on Facebook. Everything shy of 'I'm going for a poo now.' found it's way on to the screens of over 200 unfortunate souls. So if you are one of them let me apologise. All I can say in mitigation is that you have no idea what it feels like to watch your team lose it's fifth consecutive Grand Final on your birthday. It really does put a dampener on things. The champagne, had we had any, would have gone decidedly flat. Even our hysterically drunk rendition of Oasis's Slide Away couldn't really cheer the soul too much, and as for the lady with the mullet who I am quite certain was chatting me up well........Christ. I can tell you it makes you think twice about bringing out Uncle Kracker, or at least it would do if you weren't monumentally pissed and entering a period of mourning for your team's loss. So I carried on regardless, and then the microphone broke, which was probably a sign but I went through the whole rigmarole again anyway. As rubbish as things get, I never bloody give up. Like Saints. Keep trying, maybe you'll get the chance to lose again next year, boys? Brilliant. Saints are becoming a metaphor for my life and I love them for it. Wasn't it rubbish when we used to win Grand Finals? Hmm.
So it was a pretty traumatic birthday, all in all. My mate wrote on his Facebook yesterday that I fell asleep in the pub. I don't remember this, but then I wouldn't, I was asleep. It was probably the only time after about 3.00 in the afternoon that day that I was genuinely at peace with the world. He should have just left me there. Instead what I do remember is rolling home in the rain and thinking, isn't being 36 crap so far? I could have stayed in and watched Russell Grant on Strictly slo-mo, or listened to another desperate wannabe pop star whail their way through another Damien Rice gem.
But it wasn't all bad. I confess to being rather overwhelmed by the number of birthday messages I received. I took the time to reply to each and every one of them (I hope). If you are one of those people then can I just thank you again for thinking of me, especially at what turned out to be such a desperate and dismal time.
Being 36 is crap. So far.
It was supposed to be a celebration. It happened to coincide with the Super League Grand Final, an event which saw the Super Mighty Saints (they're officially called that, you know?) take on Dirty Leeds Rhinos for the fourth time in five years. We'd lost all of the previous three, aswell as last year's Grand Final against the even dirtier, downright filthy Wigan Warriors. Surely this would be our year, and what with it being my birthday and all?
Well no actually. We lost again. Stunningly and explicably, given that we were eight points up and cruising with about 20 minutes left. Well, maybe not cruising. Chugging along in a half way satisfactory fashion. Rumour has it that when Michael Shenton scored in the corner to give us a bit of breathing space I actually smiled. May even have punched the air. These reports are of course unconfirmed, and in the cold light of day I should like to deny them strenuously.
In light of what followed in the 20 or so minutes after Shenton's try I would like to request to the RFL and Super League that they do not schedule any more Grand Finals for October 8. Instead, I propose that next time October 8 falls on a Saturday that, should the SMS's be involved, the Grand Final be cancelled and the trophy just be handed to our opponents. Even if it's Wigan or Leeds. Especially if it's Wigan or Leeds. But in secret, in a discreet manner so we don't have to witness it. It's going to happen again in 2016 and, quite frankly, I'm not sure this is far enough into the future for comfort. I'll only be 41 then, and even on this most pessimistic of Mondays I am still reasonably confident that I will still be here to have to bear it. At the current rate, I could be sat there watching us lose our 10th successive Grand Final. All of which really is too awful a thought to even entertain. Honestly, it was like watching your wife sleep with your worst enemy. Ok, it was like watching your mistress sleep with your worst enemy. Excruciating. And all made worse by consuming the kind of quantities of lager normally reserved for Wayne and Waynetta.
Now it is just possible that some people (mostly men) take their sport too seriously. It really is only a game. Except it's not. Not really. At this point, under this kind of stress and pumped full of that amount of alcohol you start posting your every thought on Facebook. Everything shy of 'I'm going for a poo now.' found it's way on to the screens of over 200 unfortunate souls. So if you are one of them let me apologise. All I can say in mitigation is that you have no idea what it feels like to watch your team lose it's fifth consecutive Grand Final on your birthday. It really does put a dampener on things. The champagne, had we had any, would have gone decidedly flat. Even our hysterically drunk rendition of Oasis's Slide Away couldn't really cheer the soul too much, and as for the lady with the mullet who I am quite certain was chatting me up well........Christ. I can tell you it makes you think twice about bringing out Uncle Kracker, or at least it would do if you weren't monumentally pissed and entering a period of mourning for your team's loss. So I carried on regardless, and then the microphone broke, which was probably a sign but I went through the whole rigmarole again anyway. As rubbish as things get, I never bloody give up. Like Saints. Keep trying, maybe you'll get the chance to lose again next year, boys? Brilliant. Saints are becoming a metaphor for my life and I love them for it. Wasn't it rubbish when we used to win Grand Finals? Hmm.
So it was a pretty traumatic birthday, all in all. My mate wrote on his Facebook yesterday that I fell asleep in the pub. I don't remember this, but then I wouldn't, I was asleep. It was probably the only time after about 3.00 in the afternoon that day that I was genuinely at peace with the world. He should have just left me there. Instead what I do remember is rolling home in the rain and thinking, isn't being 36 crap so far? I could have stayed in and watched Russell Grant on Strictly slo-mo, or listened to another desperate wannabe pop star whail their way through another Damien Rice gem.
But it wasn't all bad. I confess to being rather overwhelmed by the number of birthday messages I received. I took the time to reply to each and every one of them (I hope). If you are one of those people then can I just thank you again for thinking of me, especially at what turned out to be such a desperate and dismal time.
Being 36 is crap. So far.
Thursday, 22 September 2011
Paul
Forgive me if this gets a bit 'stream of consciousness' and a bit less structured than some of my other musings. It's an emotive subject and you can't really do that part of it justice if you are quibbling with yourself about where to put an apostrophe, about word order or about which Ben Elton sit-com to quote.
So there's none of that. This is all my own work. I want to talk to you about Paul. Paul is no longer with us. If he had been, then today would have been his 40th birthday. As it turned out he didn't get more than a couple of months past his 26th birthday. The circumstances around the illness which took him are complex and still not absolutely clear to me even now, nearly 14 years on. But then they are not really the point of what I want to say here. I wanted to focus on his life and the effect he had on me, not his death, although that has had a pretty profound effect on me aswell.
Now it is often said that nobody ever has anything bad to say about someone after they pass on. We can all think of people who were considered a bit on the irksome side when they were alive but who turned into legends and geniuses after their death. Yet the plaudits from those who knew Paul came long before he left us. He was possibly the most geniunely nice bloke you could ever have the privilege to meet or be around. Totally and utterly devoid of any malice, Paul was generous, thoughtful and funny. Just well liked. Everybody liked Paul. If it didn't make you a bit of a stalker, you could search my Facebook friends list for anyone who knew him and just ask the question, and without exception they would all agree that he was a top class bloke, and they could all come up with a Paul story. Something that he said or did which made them smile, laugh or just feel better.
Like the tiime he and I were helping out with some wheelchair basketball coaching for some younger kids at our club in Fazakerley. It goes without saying that he was able to pass on the benefit of his 10+ years of experience in the sport, but he made it fun for them too by going that extra mile to entertain. During a break in the session he swapped chairs with one young kid to let him have a go in a proper basketball wheelchair. The only problem was that the chair Paul had agreed to temporarily inherit had no large wheels. This meant that he had to be pushed by someone if he was going to make any headway. Out on the street he would not even have sat in such a wretched contraption. He had that fiersome desire for independence that many of us with physical disabilities possess. Yet here he was letting some kid's dad push him around the sports hall in the name of comedy and entertainment. At this point it should be remembered that he was unable to stop himself since he could not reach down to the low wheels. The entire team falling off the bench laughing as he gamely careered into the wall of the sports hall once the offending parent had given him one big shove and let go.....
He laughed as hard as any of us, which kind of summed him up.
Though that one example may seem like a pretty ridiculous thing to do, he was far from stupid. I geniunely doubt that I would be here now were it not for the benefit of his wisdom over many years. We were pretty much inseparable for a period of around four or five years and he would often stay at our house when I lived with my mum and dad. During such times there was no problem too small for him to help me with or vice versa. We would sit up and talk for hours (sometimes after far too many shandies it must be said) and he would always be the one offering the logical solutions. Where I would fly off the handle and wallow in the hopelessness of whatever drama had beset me that week, he was always the rational presence I needed. He was a genuinely steadying influence, I found, and his absence over all these years may be a contributing factor to some of my, shall we say, less glorious life decisions. Not that I mean to blame him. I'm 38 in a few weeks time, old enough to know better than some of the lunacy I have engaged in. I'm just saying that he helped because he was wise and kind. And now I don't have that and I regret it deeply.
One of the things I am sure he would be able to help me with if he were here now is the darkness of some of my thoughts since his passing. Barely a day goes by when I don't wonder how it came to be that it was he and not I who developed such a tragic illness. Without wallowing again it just doesn't seem fair or just. We were a similar age, proud owners of the same disability and had pretty similar fitness levels since we trained together up to four times a week in those days. Though I have long since learned that the question of how this came to pass is one of life's unanswerables, it does not stop me wondering all the same. In many respects it has never quite sunk in that he has gone. I've always felt pretty terrible about the fact that I never screamed or shouted or cried or ranted or did any of the things that most people would do having suffered such a traumatic loss. Maybe that is just not me, not how I react to genuine trauma. I'm not sure because I have been fortunate enough not to lose anyone else as close to me as Paul was. He was a one-off in so many ways.
So happy 40th birthday Paul, wherever you are. You'll appreciate that I'm not a religious man but I do believe that you are somewhere better now. No doubt there is a bar nearby and that everybody around you thinks the world of you. I'm certain I'll see you up, down or around there one day but for now you'll forgive me if I plod on with this thing called life, with its early mornings and its stigmas and its Wigan Warriors Challenge Cup victories.
And for any of you reading this who knew Paul, well I hope it has brought back some of your own happy memories of him and not made you focus too much on the sadness of his absence from our lives. I'd like to think that he would have enjoyed and approved of every word I have written here and if not, well, we would have thrown a few handbag haymakers and had a good laugh about it in the morning.
So there's none of that. This is all my own work. I want to talk to you about Paul. Paul is no longer with us. If he had been, then today would have been his 40th birthday. As it turned out he didn't get more than a couple of months past his 26th birthday. The circumstances around the illness which took him are complex and still not absolutely clear to me even now, nearly 14 years on. But then they are not really the point of what I want to say here. I wanted to focus on his life and the effect he had on me, not his death, although that has had a pretty profound effect on me aswell.
Now it is often said that nobody ever has anything bad to say about someone after they pass on. We can all think of people who were considered a bit on the irksome side when they were alive but who turned into legends and geniuses after their death. Yet the plaudits from those who knew Paul came long before he left us. He was possibly the most geniunely nice bloke you could ever have the privilege to meet or be around. Totally and utterly devoid of any malice, Paul was generous, thoughtful and funny. Just well liked. Everybody liked Paul. If it didn't make you a bit of a stalker, you could search my Facebook friends list for anyone who knew him and just ask the question, and without exception they would all agree that he was a top class bloke, and they could all come up with a Paul story. Something that he said or did which made them smile, laugh or just feel better.
Like the tiime he and I were helping out with some wheelchair basketball coaching for some younger kids at our club in Fazakerley. It goes without saying that he was able to pass on the benefit of his 10+ years of experience in the sport, but he made it fun for them too by going that extra mile to entertain. During a break in the session he swapped chairs with one young kid to let him have a go in a proper basketball wheelchair. The only problem was that the chair Paul had agreed to temporarily inherit had no large wheels. This meant that he had to be pushed by someone if he was going to make any headway. Out on the street he would not even have sat in such a wretched contraption. He had that fiersome desire for independence that many of us with physical disabilities possess. Yet here he was letting some kid's dad push him around the sports hall in the name of comedy and entertainment. At this point it should be remembered that he was unable to stop himself since he could not reach down to the low wheels. The entire team falling off the bench laughing as he gamely careered into the wall of the sports hall once the offending parent had given him one big shove and let go.....
He laughed as hard as any of us, which kind of summed him up.
Though that one example may seem like a pretty ridiculous thing to do, he was far from stupid. I geniunely doubt that I would be here now were it not for the benefit of his wisdom over many years. We were pretty much inseparable for a period of around four or five years and he would often stay at our house when I lived with my mum and dad. During such times there was no problem too small for him to help me with or vice versa. We would sit up and talk for hours (sometimes after far too many shandies it must be said) and he would always be the one offering the logical solutions. Where I would fly off the handle and wallow in the hopelessness of whatever drama had beset me that week, he was always the rational presence I needed. He was a genuinely steadying influence, I found, and his absence over all these years may be a contributing factor to some of my, shall we say, less glorious life decisions. Not that I mean to blame him. I'm 38 in a few weeks time, old enough to know better than some of the lunacy I have engaged in. I'm just saying that he helped because he was wise and kind. And now I don't have that and I regret it deeply.
One of the things I am sure he would be able to help me with if he were here now is the darkness of some of my thoughts since his passing. Barely a day goes by when I don't wonder how it came to be that it was he and not I who developed such a tragic illness. Without wallowing again it just doesn't seem fair or just. We were a similar age, proud owners of the same disability and had pretty similar fitness levels since we trained together up to four times a week in those days. Though I have long since learned that the question of how this came to pass is one of life's unanswerables, it does not stop me wondering all the same. In many respects it has never quite sunk in that he has gone. I've always felt pretty terrible about the fact that I never screamed or shouted or cried or ranted or did any of the things that most people would do having suffered such a traumatic loss. Maybe that is just not me, not how I react to genuine trauma. I'm not sure because I have been fortunate enough not to lose anyone else as close to me as Paul was. He was a one-off in so many ways.
So happy 40th birthday Paul, wherever you are. You'll appreciate that I'm not a religious man but I do believe that you are somewhere better now. No doubt there is a bar nearby and that everybody around you thinks the world of you. I'm certain I'll see you up, down or around there one day but for now you'll forgive me if I plod on with this thing called life, with its early mornings and its stigmas and its Wigan Warriors Challenge Cup victories.
And for any of you reading this who knew Paul, well I hope it has brought back some of your own happy memories of him and not made you focus too much on the sadness of his absence from our lives. I'd like to think that he would have enjoyed and approved of every word I have written here and if not, well, we would have thrown a few handbag haymakers and had a good laugh about it in the morning.
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